


A Fate Worse Than Death

by ughhlester



Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: 30k+, Alternate Universe, Angst, Based off Black Mirror, Black Mirror - Freeform, Brief Sexual Themes, Dan Howell's perspective, Hints of Fluff, M/M, Sad Ending, i guess
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-07
Updated: 2018-04-07
Packaged: 2019-04-19 11:28:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 30,013
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14236305
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ughhlester/pseuds/ughhlester
Summary: Phil is Dead, but Dan has decided that he won't be for much longer.Based off S2E1 of Black Mirror





	A Fate Worse Than Death

**Author's Note:**

> Hey pals! This is my first fic that I'm posting publicly, hope you guys enjoy it!  
> Like I previously mentioned, this is based off S2E1 of Black Mirror on Netflix. You don't need to have seen it to understand what's going on here, but really it's up to you whether you want to watch it first or not. Obviously I've changed a couple things from the original episode, it's not just a retelling of the same story if that's what you have in mind.  
> That's all I really have to say though, thanks so much for reading!  
> My Tumblr is @ughhlester btw <3

Dans’ dark chocolate eyes were glazed over with tears and grief.  
His eyelids felt heavier than they had ever been, and Dan found himself annoyed with himself for feeling so heavily.  
His legs felt like they could collapse underneath him any second, and he had to wrap his fingers around the stems of the bright yellow flowers in his hands to keep his head from pounding anymore than it already was.  
Dan’s mother’s gentle hands reached out from behind him and rubbed his back. The sudden contact made him jump slightly, but he appreciated the gesture.

At his feet was a hole in the ground, with a coffin that sat next to the opening of it.  
There was a smartly dressed minister who spoke carefully to the group of people that stood in front of him.  
Dan tried to pay attention to the words he was saying, hoping that he would find comfort in at least one sentence that he said. But he found that it was mostly cliques, so Dan just tuned him out.  
It was all about what a great person his best friend, Phil was, and how missed he would be. What he would say if he was still here, and how he would want us not to be sad but rather to remember the happy memories that they all had with him. It made Dan’s stomach turn and his head pound, so he decided to just look at the ground instead.  
Phil had died about a month prior to his funeral. He had a habit of not looking both ways before crossing the street, and Dan always nagged him for it. Phil had a lot of bad habits like that, and they both always joked that he would die by being the person in a horror movie to trip while being chased by a serial killer, or falling into a pond in the desert in Australia, and before he could get the chance to get up he would be swallowed whole by an alligator.  
And as it turns out, something exactly of the sorts ended up happening.  
Phil was crossing the road by himself one afternoon, on the way to a shop a few blocks down from his house. He a little too eagerly walked into the middle of a street, and a bus driver didn’t see him jaywalking, so Phil was hit and killed. He left behind an entire life, and it made Dan so angry. It was unfair, and so typical of Phil to do something so stupid. He died barely being thirty one years old. Millions of people all around the world loved him, and he and Dan were planning on going on a world wide tour in a few months, and Phil had just dropped out, by dying. His timing was so terrible that it made Dan want to yell and scream at him. But he wasn’t even allowed to be angry with him, because Phil was dead.

...

It was a cloudy late winter day in Rossendale, Phil’s home town. It had rained that morning, so the grass was damp and the air was cold. His mum had decided to bury him where she could visit him whenever she pleased, and Phil had always felt him heart belonged in the place he grew up in anyway. Dan hated how far he would have to travel to visit him, but it decided that it would be for the best, and that it would be easier that way. To move on, that is.  
Dan was surrounded with Phil's’ friends and family. This included old university friends that had all found out about Phils death on Facebook and had left their prayers on his wall. Dan has seen it happen over and over on other peoples Facebook pages, and it annoyed him to no end. Facebook is the last place for emotions, and if you really felt bad then you would talk to your own friends about it, maybe even call Phil’s family and express your condolences with your voice.  
The people around him didn’t feel real, nor did anything else. Dan felt like he was in a cloud all on his own, and that everything happening around him had been fabricated and made up by his mind.  
Everyone was dressed in black, but everyone who chose to held bright yellow flowers. They were Dan’s idea, because Phil had expressed to him a few times how he wanted his funeral to be something other than black. He wanted colors incorporated in there somewhere, to contrast the feeling of dread and grief that filled the air.  
But it didn’t help, and everyone knew it. 

Once the service ended, Dans’ chest felt tighter than it did before. The minister stayed behind to allow some people to come up to him and ask for condolences.  
Dan carefully approached the closed coffin, and stood in front of the wreath with a bright picture of Phil in the middle. He was wearing a genuine smile with his dyed jet black hair perfectly parted to the left.  
A feeling of loss and longing struck Dans’ heart, and with that he decided that it was time to leave.  
He got in the passenger seat of his mum’s rental car, and patiently waited for her to join him while he played on his phone, avoiding social media at all costs.  
Facebook was the worst place to be. It was full of sad mutual friends he shared with Phil, as neither of them had many friends that they didn’t share with the other one. More than one person has messaged Dan with their condolences and love, and while he tried to appreciate the obvious care that these people had poured into these messages, he just found that they insulted with every single word. So he clicked on the notification so that the annoying red bubble on the edge of his messenger app would go away, and replied with a maximum of a sentence long message of appreciation without actually reading the message.  
Twitter wasn’t great either. Phil’s death had been trending topic, because of course it fucking would be. His notifications were literally flooded, and people who didn’t even follow his or Phil’s content were suddenly upset by the news that a random YouTuber that they had previously been annoyed by, was dead.  
Instagram wasn’t much better. Even though he mostly followed brands he liked and his YouTuber friends, fans of his still commented on his most recent photo with concern, and the annoying red bubble that constantly hovered at the bottom of his screen annoyed him so much to the point where his hands clenched into fists and he felt the need to scream and throw his phone across the room.  
The only place where Dan didn’t feel distracted or hurt were the games that he had installed on his phone, so he ended up just playing Crossy Road as he waited for his mum to come back.

Eventually Dans’ mum opened the car door and sat down. Dan switched his phone off and looked at her, but he refused to look at her in the eyes.  
After an uncomfortably long silence, Dan’s mum broke it.  
“How you holding up, kiddo?” She asked.  
Dan just shrugged. He didn’t want to lie and say that he was good, because he sure as hell was not. He didn’t want to turn this into a therapy session and tell the truth. He didn’t want to tell his mother that he felt like the walls were closing in on him and that his world had been literally destroyed, and it was still spinning against his will. He didn’t want to tell her that there was a Phil shaped hole in his heart, and that he was waiting for his friend to walk in the door and tell him that he was never dead in the first place, and that it was going to happen any second.  
So he just said nothing at all.

His mum looked down at her lap.  
“You know,” She said, looking back at Dan. “There’s a service online, that makes you feel as if that he’s still here. I used it when your father died. It’s not super spiritual, but it helps fill that hole in your heart while you recover. You put in his name and social media information and you can chat with a mimicked version of him. It’s really simple.”  
She reached inside her purse, and pulled out a pen and a yellow post-it note. She scribbled down something and handed the note to Dan. He gently took it in his hands, and looked down at it. It had the words “Serenity.com” written down in sloppy handwriting.  
“It will never really be him, and it’s important that you know that. But it helps tremendously with the whole process. I thought that it might help.”  
“Thanks.” Dan numbly replied. He didn’t really plan on using it, he needed to move on naturally. He did it once with his dad and he could do it again with Phil. It would be about a million times harder, and Dan knew that.  
Maybe he’d Google it out of curiosity when he got back to his hotel, but that was all he planned on doing.

The car ride to the hotel room they were staying in was slow and painfully quiet. The radio was on, but it didn’t feel like it was. Dan didn’t want to get his phone out again, and his mum had to focus on the road. Neither of them said anything, even though a few thoughts had come to his mum’s head, and once or twice, she opened her mouth to say something, but then faked a cough to cover it up.  
Both of them planned on taking a train back home the following morning. Dan’s mum wasn’t much looking forward to leaving her fragile boy alone for the first time in nearly a decade, and Dan sure as hell wasn’t looking forward to coming home to an empty and lonely apartment that was littered with Phils’ things. He didn’t know what he was going to do with all of it. Phil’s parents had had asked for a few things back, but the rest was left up to him to decide what to do with. And on top of that he didn’t know whether to move or not. If he wanted to he could afford the rent on his own, but he just would’ve have much extra left over to spend on two thousand pound jumpers like he wanted to.  
So he probably should move and maybe get a roommate, but the very thought of that sent shivers up his spine, so maybe not. And plus, if Dan did move he would be forced to go through Phil’s things. And he really, really did not want to do that.  
He decided that he would see where the wind blew him, and for now he would just put Phil’s spare socks that had been left on the coffee table in a box on the floor of his closet, and would deal with it later on. 

Dan and his mum pulled up to the hotel, and they both got out and walked up to the entrance. Neither of them said anything, since there was nothing to even say. Once they had gotten to their room and unlocked the door, the first thing Dan did was take off his suit jacket and tie, and ran straight to the cramped bathroom next to the front door. He placed his hands on the counter in front of him and looked in the mirror. His eyes were bloodshot from trying so hard not to cry, and the bags under his eyes made it look like somebody had punched him in the face.  
So he cried. He’d been aching to do so for days, and the build up was too much to contain. He sobbed and sobbed for at least half an hour, the entire time clenching his teeth and holding his hand over his mouth in order to stop himself from making noise. He knew that his mum could probably hear him the entire time, but who cared?  
His boyfriend was dead. His everything. His best friend, his emotional support. His shoulder to lean on, his entire life. The ground underneath his feet had caved in, and there was absolutely nothing that he could do about it. You could hardly blame him for crying.  
Dan and Phil were a pair. They fit together. They balanced each other out. One was useless without the other, and it didn’t help that Dan was a complete and utter loser. He never had friends before Phil, and in school he was the loner and the weirdo. When they both seperated for Christmas with their own families, Dan found himself missing Phil even though he was surrounded by people that he loved. 

So now Dan was sat on the floor of a hotel bathroom, crying his eyes out, begging himself to be quiet, while Phil was currently being lowered six feet into the ground.  
He was doomed to go home alone and sleep in a bed far too big for one person.  
Dan would say that God had a sick sense of humor, but that would be wrong. No God would do this. 

…

Dan’s mum had gone out to get dinner. She asked Dan if he wanted anything, but he politely declined. She then offered to bring him something, and he still said no. His appetite was completely gone, and there was no point in trying to eat something, when he wouldn’t even enjoy it. It also didn’t help that he constantly felt like throwing up.  
So while his mum was gone, he listened to Frank Ocean songs on his laptop while lying in his perfectly made bed. He had changed into pajamas, and the suit he was previously wearing was on the floor.  
After about thirty minutes of feeling sorry for himself he was bored, and needed something to keep his mind off the gaping hole in his heart. So instead of avoiding social media and the internet in general, Dan decided to check out the website that his mum had told him about earlier. Dan’s curiosity got the best of him, and that usually resulted in chaos, but just this once he figured that it would be fine. 

The website was made for people who were grieving. It had been around for a few years, and at the bottom of the front page there were a few different reviews from customers talking about how much being able to chat with their loved ones one last time helped them. They talked about how grateful they were that they were able to say goodbye, and the reviews were all obviously written from the heart.  
There was a load of services, but the most popular was just a basic digital messaging. It was free, and simple, just as Dan’s mum said it was. All you had to do was put in the person’s name whom you were grieving over, and their social media information. It took information and data from their profiles, and an AI would mimic the person and things that they would say, and talks to you like they were them.  
The idea was simple enough.  
And it was strangely appealing, which scared Dan.  
But the thing was that Phil was a social media influencer. Apart from his own personal Facebook page, Phil only shared carefully thought out messages. He was never, ever the kind of person to share personal information. He always wanted to make people smile, not frown from sympathy. Phil’s family and close friends were the only ones who knew anything intimate about him, and it was always going to stay like that.  
So Dan worried that if he did use the service that he would get a watered down, not real version of Phil.  
But it didn’t really matter, did it? Even if Dan did put in Phil’s information, he wouldn’t begin to rely on this thing. There would always be the voice in the back of his head telling him that this was the real Phil, sure, but he would always know in his heart and brain that it was a fake. A robot, and AI designed to make him not so miserable.  
He would only talk once or twice, and then he’d get so overwhelmed and sad with longing for the real Phil that he would angrily slam his laptop shut, and then just feel worse than he did when he started.

Then Dan realized that there were tears in his eyes. He covered his face with his hands, and rubbed his eyes. He groaned a soft fuck and then closed his laptop and placed it on the floor. He flopped back into the bed, and cried softly to himself with his arms on his head and his fingers in his hair.  
It was only 8 pm, but regardless Dan shuffled under the covers and reached his arm to turn off the lamp next to the bed. It was the only light in the room that was on, and so it went pitch black except for the moon shining through the windows on the other side of the room.  
Dan’s eyes hung open, staring at the full moon in the sky. It reminded him of a night that he shared with Phil a few years back when they lived in Manchester together. 

They were cuddling on the couch in the living room, right on top of each other. Dan had been lying down on his back with his long legs dangling off the sides and Phil was only half-awake on Dan’s chest. They had been watching a movie together on the couch, and once it had ended neither of them had the energy to get up and walk to the bedroom. So instead they just went from sitting in each others arms to lying on top of each other on their tiny couch hardly big enough for two people.  
Dan sleepily switched the off button to the tv, so the room was left only being lit by the moon peeking through the window.  
The Manchester Apartment had a balcony outside of the lounge, and with it came a huge window that nearly took up an entire wall.  
Soft moonlight filled the room and warmed the hearts of the boys slowly falling asleep to the rhythm of the other ones breathing. It was a peaceful and beautiful night, and was the exact kind of thing that was written about in romance novels.

The memory didn’t upset Dan- to his surprise. It was a soft and loving memory of his time with Phil, and it made him smile. The only thing that made his heart strain was when he found himself unconsciously hugging a pillow at the memory of being with Phil.  
Dan closed his eyes as tight as he could and scrunched his nose to shake the grief that overwhelmed him.  
He forced his mind back to happy memories of Phil until he forgot that he was lying alone in a hotel bed, in the dark while his mum was out having fun without him. He transferred his mind to the past, when everything was a million times better. The memory of his best friend lulled him to sleep, and he went on to have dreams about him. 

...

“Oh good, you’re awake,” Dan’s mum said after she heard him rustling in his bed.  
“I was worried that you were-” She paused and cleared her throat. “I thought that you were going to be asleep forever.”  
Dan blinked his eyes open, and propped himself up on his elbows to look at his mother who was making her own bed. “What time is it?” He croaked, reaching for his phone on the nightstand and unplugging it.  
“A quarter to nine.”  
“When I got back you were asleep, which is extremely out of character for you,” His mum chucked. “Did you eat anything? I know you said you weren’t hungry, but I practiced some self-control skills and brought you some of my spaghetti from last night. It’s in the mini fridge if you want it.”  
“Thanks,” was the only thing Dan could say in response. He was barely awake, and his vision hadn’t adjusted to his surroundings yet.  
Silence filled the air for a moment.  
“To be honest, mum,” Dan forced himself to say. “I don’t really want to eat leftover spaghetti in a dirty hotel room. Would you be up to getting breakfast with me in a few?”  
Dan’s mum smiled at him, and her eyes lit up.  
“Of course,” She smiled. “I would love to. It’d be good for you to get out and do something. Even if I did just waste spaghetti but putting it in a box, because I’m sure as hell not eating pasta that’s cold in the middle.”  
Dan chuckled. It was good to see his mum again, despite the circumstances.  
She opened his suitcase and grabbed a pair of jeans and a random top and threw it on the foot of Dan’s bed. “Now go get dressed and tame that rats’ nest on your head.” 

…

Dan pushed the house keys into the front door, carefully opening it.  
His lunch with his mum had been a lot more enjoyable than he anticipated it being. He scarfed down his pancakes, since he hadn’t eaten since his breakfast the day before. While it was tasty, and refreshing to get food in his stomach, it made him miss America.  
Dan and Phil had been to America together several times. Dan had never been, his family always went on trips to places more exciting like New Zealand or Jamaica, but Phil went on holiday with his family to Florida every year.  
In 2016 they went on a two-month long tour through America. They had already been to the UK, their home country, so they took a huge leap of faith and rented out a tour bus and spent two months doing nothing but working and eating pancakes.  
America had significantly better pancakes than the UK did, so every time Dan ate flat, lemon tinted pancakes he found himself missing the sugary mess that was birthday cake flavored pancakes with about 10 pounds of icing and butter on top, enough to give the healthiest person in the world diabetes. 

Even though it had been a month since Phil died, Dan still didn’t find it any easier to not feel him constantly hovering behind him in public transport. Not that he had done much else but stay inside and lie on the floor since Phil had been gone.  
Regardless, the train ride home wasn’t easy.  
He sat alone, a few seats down from an old lady who Dan worried was dead a couple of times during the trip. He had earbuds in the whole time, so he didn’t hear any of the suspicious sounds the train made when it ran over something that could either be a person or a badger.  
More than anything though, it was boring.  
The empty space that sat in the seat next to Dan’s was extremely loud, and demanded to make itself heard.  
God, he wished that he had just swallowed his pride and stayed with his mum instead of going home. 

The second the keys clicked in the lock and Dan took a step in, he already was having a hard time breathing.  
Every light in the house was off, and Dan turned the heat off before he left, so it was freezing. The very first thing he did was get his winter coat out of the closet next to the front door and put it on. Sure, it wasn’t very comfortable, but it was practical. He turned the heat back on, and once his teeth had stopped chattering, it settled in again.  
Phil was dead.  
He was never coming home, and this apartment contained nothing but the remains of his and Dan’s relationship.  
Apart from Dans’ succulents, the house plants with brown tips on the leaves were Phil’s. He had an addiction to constantly buying new plants, and as a result his house was no less green than a rainforest.  
They were everywhere. There were small cactuses that sat on window sills and 7-foot tall bamboo plants that leaned on bookcases and brushed against the ceiling.  
Dan didn’t know what to do with them.  
He couldn’t just throw them out or let them die, the guilt would eat him up inside. Besides, the plants gave the place a sense of home. The slightly crusty leaves on big bushes of plants gave the place the sense that real people lived there, and that it wasn’t just a plastic barbie dream house.  
He’d water them and keep to Phil’s schedule of what plants needed to be watered on what days for now, Dan decided. But he wouldn’t hold it against himself when they all inevitably died and he ended up just replacing them with fakes.

The walls and shelves were filled the brim with things Dan and Phil had done together. There were souvenirs they had gotten from their trip to Japan on the shelves, and the kitchen was full of about a million mugs in the cupboard.  
They both knew that they had an absurd amount of mugs for two people, but they kept buying them anyway. 

The sight of the home Dan had built with the love of his life made him sick.  
How did it ever come to this?  
One second Dan was with Phil and laughing about the dumbest and smallest things in the world, and the next Phil was being run over by a bus in the middle of a busy road.  
People had written countless fanfictions about either Dan or Phil dying and the other one missing them tremendously, but Dan never thought that it would actually happen.  
What a sick joke.

He didn’t even know what to make of the situation at hand. Dan had never been on his own in years, and he was Dan. Dan from Dan and Phil. He didn’t know to just be Dan.  
His entire life was built around his relationship with Phil, and now that had been thrown out the window, he wondered what was even left? What was his reason for waking up in the morning? What was his reason for existing at all?  
He knew in his heart that he would never ever get Phil back. He would never find another person that could ever fill the hole in his heart, he would never find another person like him.

Dan put his suitcase on the lounge floor and unzipped it. He took out his laptop and opened it, plopping down on the couch. After he had logged in, his hands hovered over the keyboard and shook for a moment.  
He typed in the name of the website he had visited the night before, and blankly stared at his screen for a moment before pressing the sign up button in the corner of the screen.  
After the screen loaded, Dan let out a shaky breath and cautiously gave the website all of Phil’s information.  
Here goes nothing.

... 

Dan’s mouse hovered over the subject line.  
Serenity had just sent him an email, asking him to confirm his email address.  
It was no different from signing up for a website or a newspaper, except this time Dan was signing up to something that had the potential to completely destroy him.  
This could either ruin him or save him, and either way Dan wasn’t sure it was a good idea.

“This is stupid,” Dan muttered to himself. “And I fucking know it. What am I doing?”  
As soon as he reached for the lid on his laptop, ready to slam it shut his phone buzzed.  
It was a text from his mum.  
Get home OK?  
Goddammit, his mum.  
He had forgotten about her, and for a second he thought about what she would do. If she were him, what would she do? His mum had never really been the greatest of influences, but it’s not like asking was going to cause any real harm.  
Fuck it.  
Dan pressed his thumb against the home button and his phone unlocked, and he typed back a message.  
yes, i’m good. can i call you 

He figured that he’d ask his mum what to do. Since she was the only person in his life whom he both trusted and who wasn’t dead.  
Seconds later, to his surprise, his phone buzzed again. His mum was never good at texting back, but he figured that she felt guilty for leaving him on his own.  
Yes, you O.K.?  
Dan ignored the question and just pressed call.

The phone rang for a moment.  
“Hey,” Dan’s mum answered. “Everything alright?”  
“Yes, yes I’m fine,” Dan muttered quickly. “I just thought I’d ask you for advice and I  
didn’t want to text you about it because it’d come out better out loud.”  
His mum didn’t reply, but he knew somehow she was listening.  
“Okay, so,” he started. “It’s about the service you gave me the link to. The one where you  
talked to Dad after he died-- er, I guess a mimicked version of him.”  
Dan found himself tripping over his words because he was struggling to get his point across as quickly as possible. He ran his fingers through his silky and curly hair, and took a deep breath to calm himself down.  
“Anyway, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to use it. I figured I’d ask you since there isn’t exactly anyone else to call who would know,” Dan laughed awkwardly. “Like, does it work? Did it ruin your life when you used it or was it fine? I just wanted to ask Phil something and--”  
Dan’s mum cut him off before he could dig himself in a hole any deeper.  
“Okay, Dan, Jesus Christ. Slow down. Use English, first of all. Second, are you asking me if I think it’s a good idea to sign up for Serenity or are you asking me the formula for time travel because honestly, judging by the speed of which you’re talking it could be either.”  
Dan awkwardly chuckled. “Uh, right. Sorry.”  
“Honestly Dan, I can’t make that decision for you. If you think it would help to talk to Phil again, then go for it. But if you think that you’ll end up spending a bunch of money on this fake Phil then I’d suggest that you didn't. This is a judgement call that you have to make.”  
She paused for a moment.  
“If you want to know what I did though, I went for it. I dived straight in without even thinking, and that maybe wasn’t the best idea. I didn’t spend any money on this thing, but it was great to chat with your dad again as if we were teenagers again. The thing was though, was that it was a lot to take in. One second he was here, the next he wasn’t, and then there he was again. It was like hopping between parallel universes, and I won’t lie, it was weird. But being able to take a break from being miserable for a few minutes was nice.”  
Dan pinched the bridge of his nose, and his hands began to shake.  
“Okay, great. Thanks mum,” He said carefully. “That actually helps a lot. Bye, love you.”  
“Love you too, Dan.”

The phone beeped as she hung up, and Dan once again felt overwhelmed with the feeling of choice.  
It was up to him.  
It seemed like damn near everything was up to him now.  
He had to decide absolutely every single little thing for himself, and there wasn’t anyone to ask to do it for him or even to ask for advice.  
One one side, Dan knew it was a bad idea.  
But on the other side he wanted so badly and desperately to do it.  
“God, I don’t know!” Dan shouted to an empty apartment. His head was pounding and his palms were shaking and sweating.  
He stood up from the couch and put his hands over his head and groaned as loud as he could.  
“Okay,” he muttered, putting his hands in front of him as they shook.

What would Phil do?  
Phil would just go for it. Phil would trust in his gut every time, and always go with the most logical answer.  
So, was the most logical answer to just leave it?  
What would Phil’s gut say?

Dan sat back down and put his head in his hands, messing up his hair in the process.  
He could feel the weight behind his eyes building up, and he begged himself not to cry.  
Everything was so intense. Dan could feel his heart pounding in his chest and through his veins. His blood must’ve been moving at a million miles an hour, and he wanted to get up and rip out the cords from the TV and throw the damn thing at the wall.  
What would Phil do?  
What would Phil do?  
What would Phil do?

“Oh, fuck what Phil would do! Phil is dead!” Dan cried.  
He angrily grabbed his thin laptop in his fists and sat straight up. He placed it in his lap, and clicked on the link on his screen.  
The link took him to a mostly blank page except for two grey lines that formed a box in the middle of the screen with a place to type text in at the bottom.

Dan wasn’t really sure what to say, and he didn’t know what to expect.  
He wiped angry tears off his face and unclenched his jaw, and hovered his fingertips over the keyboard.

hey phil,

…

Dan had been talking to Fake Phil for about a week now, a couple times a day. He asked him what being dead was like, and Phil of course replied with exactly what he would say if he were really being asked.  
Dan could somehow hear the giggles after every joke and comment, and he wasn’t going to lie to himself and say that it made him miss Phil any less. 

But what it did do was make Dan feel like he was 18 again.  
When Dan was 18, and Phil was 22, they would both talk on Skype for hours at a time.  
Phil was a university student at York, and he wasn’t really sure what he wanted to be. He wasn’t planning on using his degree, and mostly used University as an excuse to get drunk with good friends and to learn a few new things he didn’t know before.  
He knew that he wanted to be in the media somewhere, but he wasn’t sure where yet. So as a start, he made videos on YouTube.  
YouTube ended up becoming his entire life, and he gained a very significant fan base over the years. He made silly videos in his bedroom talking about funny things that happened to him and what had been on his mind recently. Phil always seemed to attract weird people and experiences, so he always had a funny story to tell.  
People loved him, and so Phil kept making videos.

Among Phil’s following was Dan. Dan was a shy and insecure teenager who spent most of his time on the internet-- and mostly YouTube. He loved Phil, and wanted badly to be his friend. So when he was 18, he started being the first person to watch and comment on Phil’s videos, the first person to reply to Phil’s tweets, and eventually the two became friends.  
They had a ton of things in common, like their love for YouTube and different artists and TV shows. They would often talk for hours at a time on Skype, about the most random and seemingly insignificant things.  
Dan eventually ended up crushing on Phil. Who could blame him? He was a lonely teenager who was bullied and didn’t get much attention from anyone but him, so Dan wasn’t very surprised when he noticed butterflies in his stomach one day when talking with him on Skype.  
And it wasn’t long before Dan charmed Phil as well, and they ended up dating a few months after they became friends.

Dan always thought of his romance with Phil like it belonged in a novel. It was so perfect almost all of the time, and he fell in love with every single detail of him, including his bedhead and morning breath.  
Phil had a way of making Dan swoon, from the moment they first saw each other over a shitty webcam, to the last time Dan kissed Phil on his way out nine years later.  
Phil drove Dan crazy, and he lived for it. 

Dan was in his bed with his back against the headboard and his laptop resting in his lap.  
The sun had gone down a few hours ago, and Dan was enjoying the quiet of the night with his window open.  
Sure, he lived next to a busy street in London, but the swishing of cars driving across wet pavement was oddly relaxing.  
And plus, Dan’s room was exceptionally hot that night, so the cool night air helped cool him down.

He was watching an old episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Phil’s favorite show. Phil had watched it a million times, and then another million times with Dan.  
He found himself missing Phil more than usual that day after having a dream of waking up next to him, but then awoke in an empty and cold bed. So he decided that maybe doing things that reminded him of his boyfriend would make him feel ever so slightly better.  
It didn’t, really.

All it really did was made Dan wish that Phil was sitting next to him, laughing at jokes that he had heard a million times and mouthing the words to his favorite scenes.  
It was unbearable, really.  
So Dan paused the show in the middle of a boring scene, and opened a new tab.  
He wanted to talk to Phil, and he was going to do just that.

you there?  
Dan already knew the answer. Even though it was nearly 2 in the morning, Dan knew that “Phil” would be awake. AI’s didn’t need to sleep, and Dan’s little robot friend was no exception.  
Hi Dan  
i wish you were here and not just in this stupid computer  
Me too

Dan bit his lip, knowing that if Phil had a choice he would rather be nowhere but with Dan right now.  
i wish i could hear your voice again

Who said that you couldn’t?  
Dan blinked.  
what do you mean

A link was pasted into the chat, and Dan hesitantly clicked on it, worried that it would be a virus or some weird website that would max out Dan’s credit card without his consent.  
Instead it was a page on the website that Dan had been using to talk to Phil in the first place.  
In big cursive letters at the top of the page it read, “Hear their voice again”  
Below it was a paragraph that was poetically inclining, and it obviously had been put a lot of thought into it.  
It spoke about how when someone is gone, we can sometimes still hear their voice repeating in our heads.  
We can hear their laugh, and the way they gasp for air when they’d been laughing for a while.  
But what if we could actually hear it again, with our ears, and not just our minds?

The service was cheap, but it still cost money.  
The idea was that you’d put in videos of the person you’d lost, and the AI mimicked their voice and things that they said.  
Serenity did a lot of mimicking.

Dan instantly thought it was dumb, like he always did.  
But he knew that the idea sounded appealing, so he was down for spending money on it  
if he could hear Phil’s voice again. That is, talking to him.  
If he really wanted to he could’ve just gone to an old video that Phil had made, either on his main channel or on the gaming channel that they shared together.  
But Dan edited most of the videos that he made with Phil, so he had heard every line a million times.  
And he watched and helped edit Phil’s videos too, so anything that he could find on the internet was old news.  
And Dan of course had videos saved of Phil goofing about on his phone and computer, but he had watched each of them several times, even more so since Phil had been gone. He at one point laid awake all night on his phone, rewatching videos he took of Phil on his iPhone on trips they took together.  
By the end of the night Dan’s eyes were bloodshot with crying and staring at his bright phone screen. When he looked in the mirror the next day, his curls had lumped together into one big frizzy mess, and the bags under his eyes looked like bruises.

Something that Dan missed more than anything was when the two would be in bed, talking about random crap and usually annoying the other one.  
Phil would agonize over the “what if”s while Dan would grunt and say “I don’t know what would happen if a bear got into the apartment, Phil. Why can’t we just go to sleep and let our subconscious decide what to do with the idea of bears killing our families? So I can sleep, eh?” And Phil would sigh and say “Fine, but don’t come running to me when a bear kills us both horribly.”  
Dan would sometimes keep Phil up too, it wasn’t a one sided thing. Dan was an existential person, and he’d freak Phil out with ideas of death and how they were going to die. He’d go on about how unfair it was that he was given one body and he couldn’t do anything about it. How of all places, and of all the people that you could be, why were you, you?  
Phil would say “Oh my God, Dan. You’re going to give me a crisis if you never stop. Go to sleep.”  
Sometimes though, Phil would roll over and look at the dark blurry blob that was Dan, since he wasn’t wearing contact lenses or glasses and they were in the dark. He’d talk Dan down, and say “Yes, a million consequences happened for you to be born and raised the way that you were. But isn’t it beautiful that another million consequences happened for you to be in bed with me, right now? Isn’t that something to smile over?”  
And Dan would reply with something morbid, and they’d go back and forth until Dan admitted that Phil was right. Phil would kiss Dan on the forehead and take him in his arms.  
“You know I’m right. Now go to sleep, Dan. I love you,” Phil would close his eyes and cuddle up against Dan’s shoulder.  
Dan would smile back and wrap his own arms around Phil.  
“I love you too.”

Dan didn’t have any record of Phil telling him that he loved him. While their relationship was public, yes, they didn’t want to shove it down people’s throats. They weren’t mushy on camera, and once they had come out, nothing about their content changed. They were still their normal, happy selves, except now they didn’t have to be afraid to hold hands in public in fear that someone would see and post a picture online. They could just be Dan and Phil, in love, and everyone knew it.

Dan decided that he wanted to hear Phil’s voice again, so he spent the rest of the night downloading videos with Phil in them which he didn’t already have saved on his computer.  
He stopped at videos from 2015, as eventually Dan bored of doing the same damn thing a million times.  
He uploaded the videos to the website, and then decided to get something to eat because he hadn’t eaten since the morning. Not to mention his legs had begun to fall asleep from sitting down for so long, so he really needed to get up and walk around.  
He decided to make mexican stir fry, because he’d have to stand up for a while to make it, and his knees needed it.

By the time he’d finished eating, he was tired and needed to go to bed. So he plugged his phone into its charger and placed it on the nightstand, and went to sleep. It was 3 am at this point, but it wasn’t exactly out of the norm for him. He always had a horrible sleep schedule, and he wasn’t about to change it now.  
So he would wake up at 2 in the afternoon the next day, and then go to bed much after midnight the following night.  
It was a never ending cycle, and Dan knew how unhealthy it was. But there was nobody to tell him to stop except himself, so he wasn’t going to do anything about it.

He shuffled himself underneath his covers, and closed his eyes.  
His room was nearly pitch black, which he didn’t love. He had always been afraid of the dark, even into adulthood.  
But it was oddly peaceful. The dead quiet of the night was almost nice.  
Almost.

The next morning Dan didn’t open his eyes at first.  
His eyelids stayed glued together as he lie motionless, and he waited for something pivotal to happen to get him up.  
Eventually, Dan’s shoulder began to ache for staying in the same spot for so many hours.  
So he rolled over and unplugged his phone, checking the time on the screen.  
1:52 pm  
He had gotten up earlier than he expected, which was sad since it was much after noon.

Dan rolled out of his cocoon of warmth and got ready. He used the toilet, combed his hair, brushed his teeth, and even brought himself to floss.  
He didn’t bother changing, though. He wasn’t going anywhere anyway, so he decided to just keep the same slightly dirty pajamas on.

He sat back down onto his bed after getting himself cleaned up. He balanced his laptop on his lap and put in his password.  
Dan was going to talk to Phil today, he decided.  
He had started the process the night before, but never really came full circle with it.  
The tab was still open from the night before, which made Dan’s life easier.

The instructions on the page read that the very last step to setting it up was to enter your phone number. Once you did, the program would call you, and you’d talk, and once you set up a contact for the service then you would receive calls whenever.  
You could set up a time frame that you were available to talk, so if you worked you could make sure that you wouldn’t be getting calls in the middle of the work day.  
Dan would normally say that any time was fine; since he wasn’t working at the time, and because he never slept. But he knew that he didn’t want the thing to ruin his life, so he set boundaries.

He and Phil used to talk constantly. Before they moved in together, they were on the phone non stop. Skype was home for them, and they could spend every waking moment together. Sometimes Phil would call Dan at midnight, and apologize for calling so late. Dan would pretend that he hadn’t just been asleep, desperately trying to hide the grogginess in his voice.  
Phil said that he had lectures all day, and that he was so bored by university. He’d rather talk to Dan than do anything else.  
And so Dan being Dan, he let him. He loved Phil, and would lasso down the moon for him, so he if he lost a couple hours of sleep over him, it was the least of his worries.  
Even almost a decade later, the same was true. Dan would’ve given up his own life for Phil’s, but then what would be the point? Phil would be going through the same thing Dan was right now, and Phil wouldn’t be able to handle it. He refused to think about the possibility of death, whether it was his own fate or someone else’s.  
So being confronted with his Dan’s death would completely destroy him.  
Maybe Dan would rather be the one to bite the bullet.  
Even if it wasn’t very fun.

Dan gave Serenity his phone number, and a message popped up on the screen that read, “All done! Wait by the phone for call from your special someone.”  
Dan held his phone tightly in both his hands, afraid to blink in case he missed it.  
After a minute, the phone rang, and Dan answered it on the very first ring.  
He immediately put the phone to his ear, and tried to say something but he ended up just choking on his own words. His hands were shaking, and he grabbed his wrist with his right hand in order to keep his hand still enough to hold his phone.  
“Hey,” a bright voice rang in Dan’s ears.  
It was Phil's’ voice.  
The voice was undoubtedly Phil’s.  
It was the perfect mix of a northern and a southern British accent.  
The Northern part made Phil speak slowly and carefully, and the southern part made him sound less like the queen and more like a normal British man.  
“Are you there?”  
Dan’s eyes jumped across the room, and he looked for something to focus on, but he found nothing.  
“Uh, yeah,” Dan carefully put his head on his pillow, and started to trace the familiar patterns of his bedroom ceiling. “I’m here.”  
“Hi, Dan,” There was a certain softness in Phil’s voice that made Dan’s heart flutter, and he felt like he was 18 again.  
He felt like he shouldn’t have been able to be here. He shouldn’t have been able to be lying on his back in his bed that he used to shared with Phil, alone. He shouldn’t have been able to be speaking to his best friend as if nothing had ever happened. Like Phil had never been hit by a bus, like Dan hadn’t attended his funeral a week earlier. It was almost as if Phil was just up north with his family, and Dan was calling to chat. He shouldn’t have been able to talk to a dead man.  
And yet, here he was playing God at his own game.  
“Hi, Phil,” Dan’s voice cracked as he spoke. His eyes were welling up with tears, and he couldn’t decide whether they were because he was overwhelmed with relief, sadness, or joy. 

Neither Dan nor Phil spoke for a moment. Neither of them knew what to say.  
“Phil?” Dan croaked.  
“Hm?”  
“I love you.”  
“I love you, too.”  
And with that, Dan hung up and put his phone down on the bed next to him.  
He sat up from his spot on the bed, folded his legs underneath him and wrapped his arms around his torso.  
Dan shut his eyes as tight as they could shut, and he let himself cry harder than he had in years.

…

“What did you get?” Phil asked over the phone, just as Dan sat down at a small table in the corner of Starbucks.  
“Just a green tea and a turkey sandwich,” Dan replied, placing his hot drink and sandwich on the table in front of him. “Nothing too interesting.”  
“You should’ve got me something,” Phil giggled, and Dan chucked in response  
“I would if I could,” Dan said.  
Dan quickly changed the subject of his lunch to avoid the inevitable awkward silence that was doomed to follow between him and his dead friend.

“Anyway,” He started in between sips of his tea. He scrunched his nose up at the burning that overcame his tongue after he realized that the tea was still boiling hot.  
“I watched this movie the other day, and it was literally the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen. I was bored and hadn’t used Netflix in a while, so I thought I’d try and watch something that I hadn’t seen before. It sounded good but it just ended up being really stupid. Basically, it was about...”  
Dan wanted to just have a casual chat with Phil, and let him speak, but he soon realized that an AI never really had anything to say. It’s not like Phil had been up to anything anyway, considering he had been dead the entire time he’d been gone.  
He ended up doing most of the talking. Which he did a lot anyway, he was a talkative guy while Phil was more careful about what he wanted to say. Dan could go on a ten-minute rant about anything. Give him a topic and he would be able to go on and on.

So Phil often just tuned Dan out while he ranted about whatever it was that was currently on his mind. And eventually Dan would say, “And-- Are you even listening?” and Phil would laugh and say “Huh? Oh sorry, I was ignoring you,” After Dan scoffed at him, Phil would follow up with, “I mean-- can you really blame me?”  
And he never could.

So Dan found himself on the phone in a slow Starbucks in London, on the phone with a robot. It was a robot that sounded and acted like his dead boyfriend, but that didn’t make it much better.  
After Dan had finished his rant about how awful Hollywood was- or whatever it was that he was talking about- he paused for a second and looked at the table in front of him.  
“I’ve missed you, Phil,” He admitted. “I wish you were here.”  
“What, so I could ignore you in person?” Phil chuckled.  
“Oh shut up!” Dan laughed.

For a moment, the world was full of color again.  
The London sky looked less gray and gloomy, and while it still looked absolutely miserable and boring, it was less unbearable.  
Dan’s eyes were no longer just tired. They had life flickering in them, and his brown eyes suddenly weren’t dark and cloudy. They were bright, and they were golden.  
Dan wanted to go out and talk for hours instead of lie lifeless on the floor, or on his bed, or on the futon in his room.  
He wanted to live, and here he was doing just that.  
It was artificial happiness, though. And he felt like a total fraud because of it. He knew that the warmness in his heart was going to disappear the second that he hung up on Phil.  
But in the moment, he could just appreciate the cloud of arrogance that he was floating in.

In the moment, he fell in love with being alive.  
And he fell in love with lying to himself about his own world. He fell in love with talking to a dead man, and he fell in love with being arrogant about his own life.  
But more than anything, he was in love with Phil.  
Phil, dead or alive, owned Dan’s heart.  
And no therapist was ever going to be able to fix that.

…

Once Dan got home, the first thing that he did was call Phil.  
He had hung up on the Underground, as to not be annoying to the people around him.  
“Hey,” Phil answered.  
“Hey, Phil. Sorry I had to hang up, but I just got home and I thought we’d talk some more.”  
“That’s alright. What are you doing with the rest of your evening?” Phil asked.  
“Well, I’m not really sure. I was thinking of maybe making a video,” Dan slid his fingers across the kitchen counter. “I haven’t uploaded in nearly two months, and people are worried. I don’t really blame them, and I should probably be working. You know, to get my mind off stuff.”  
“Off me, you mean?”  
“Yeah,” Dan tilted his head to the side slightly, and adjusted his hair.  
“I mean, you don’t really need to, do you? Since I’m right here.”  
Dan shook his head and picked at his fingernails.  
“No you’re not, not really,” Dan bit on the inside of his cheek. “I can’t see you, I can’t touch you. So you’re not real, are you?”  
“No, I suppose not.” Phil obviously wanted to say something, but he didn’t say it.  
Funny that Dan could hear the emotion in a robots voice.  
“What?” Dan hesitantly asked.  
“Oh, nothing,” Phil replied.  
Dan was doubtful, but he didn’t bother asking again. 

Phil coughed. “I think making a video would be a great idea. What would it be about?”  
Dan was relieved to get off the topic of Phil.  
“Oh, I don’t know. I don’t wanna make a video addressing everyone’s concerns, since it’d be a bit weird and depressing. I might make another Internet Support Group or something, considering it’s been a while since I’ve made one.” Dan chuckled to himself. “Though, it’s been a while since I’ve made any video, hasn’t it?”  
Phil giggled in response. “I guess so.”  
Dan found himself smiling like a bit of an idiot, standing in the middle of his kitchen.

“Phil?”  
“Hm?”  
“Can I tell you a story about us?” Dan smiled.  
“Hit me.”  
Dan bit on his bottom lip to keep himself from smiling so much.  
“Okay, so a couple years back we were both just hanging out in the house, and you were in your room, doing your own thing. I was doing the dishes and it was just a chill day, you know? Then, literally out of nowhere, you screamed bloody murder. I mean, it was an earth-shattering scream, and I’m positive that the neighbors considered calling the police. I dropped a mug out of shock and sprinted to go find you. I was sure you were dying, but no. Guess what you were doing?”  
“What?”  
“You were playing a horror game.”  
Phil laughed, and Dan did as well.  
“You scared me half to death! But no, you just got jumpscared. The funny thing was- too, that you were never a screamer. But I don’t know, but on that specific day you were. We both had to sit down and take a deep breath afterwards, but it was funny once I had gotten over the initial shock of thinking you were being violently stabbed.”  
Phil was still giggling. “Wow,” he laughed. “What happened to the mug?”  
“Oh, it was shattered. We had to throw it out, which sucked because it was one of my favorites.”  
“But we had a million other mugs anyway, right?” Phil replied.  
“Yeah. Yeah, I guess we did.” Dan sighed.  
The two sat in happy silence for a moment.

“You talk about me like I’m something from the past,” Phil pointed out.  
Dan clenched his jaw.  
“Don’t.”  
“Sorry.”  
Dan bit on his bottom lip again, because he was afraid that if he didn’t he would start yelling. Or worse, crying.  
“Tell me another story,” Phil said, bringing a happier atmosphere into the room.  
“Okay. Um,” Dan thought for a moment, trying to think of a funny story.  
“Oh, I’ve got one.”  
Dan told Phil about the time that Phil was tired one night, and watered his cactus before he went to bed. He must’ve been half asleep, because he put the cactus in a drawer instead of where it belonged. The next day Dan impaled himself on the spikes, because he was not expecting a cactus to be in the drawer.  
Phil laughed through the whole story, making sure not to make Dan upset again.

Dan eventually sat on the couch, and talked to Phil for the next 2 hours.  
He wasn’t expecting to spend so much time talking to him, but that’s what ended up happening.  
The only reason he hung up was because he wanted to work on a video, and his cheeks hurt from smiling so much.  
So he hung up, and sat down on the desk in his bedroom and gathered a collection of emails from his address that he used to make Internet Support Groups. Once he was finished, he changed into a white collared shirt and spent a couple of hours filming.  
He quickly realized how much more difficult filming was with only one person. He always got Phil to be his camera-man, but now Dan just had to do it all himself.  
It wasn’t that horrible, since he didn’t have to haul the camera across the house to film any skits. But it still was annoying to have to do it all himself.

Dan ordered pizza after he was done filming, and in the meantime worked on editing his video.  
When the pizza arrived, he tipped the pizza man and watched an episode of an anime while he ate.  
He wanted to keep watching when he was done eating, but decided that he needed to edit and get his video up before the internet broke into his house and killed him. In order to avoid being burned alive, he opened Twitter.  
“new daniel howell video coming soon get hyped”  
“When will it be up?” Someone replied after a moment.  
“hopefully saturday” Dan tweeted back.  
His mentions were people getting excited about seeing Dan again, and a lot of them guessed that he was going to post something addressing Phil’s death.  
Hearing people speculate made him feel a little bit bad for just avoiding the topic, but it didn’t matter.  
Everyone who didn’t live under a rock already knew Phil was dead anyway, there was no real reason for Dan to bring it up in the first place.  
Plus, what would he even say?  
‘Hey, Internet I’ve been depressed over the death of my boyfriend, here let me tell you the story of his death that you’ve all already heard a million times.’  
It didn’t matter.

…

The response to Dan’s new video was mixed.  
Some people were happy to see Dan in a good mood, and others were suspicious of how okay he seemed. They look note of how for a grieving person he seemed to be awfully cheerful.  
Some were pissed that Dan would just ignore Phil’s death like he did, and others protected his coping mechanism of just ignoring it.  
Most people, though, said that he looked tired.  
He was.  
His eyes were grey and dark, and his lips were chapped. He hadn’t been getting much sleep, and he was eating himself alive from the inside out.  
Despite the fact that Phil was just a phone call away, it still hurt. Dan missed his best friend more and more with each passing day. The fact that he could hear him but never touch him made him physically sick.

Dan thought about replying to someone who had asked about Phil, but the only things that he could think of saying came off as passive aggressive. So he just left it and decided that he would talk about it later, maybe in a live show or something.  
Just as Dan closed Twitter, his phone buzzed.  
Phil was calling him, which felt oddly weird considering Dan was usually the one who wanted to talk.  
But sure, if a robot wanted to talk to him, who was he to stop him?  
“Hello,” Dan answered.  
“Hey, how are you?” Phil beamed.  
“I’m okay, you?”  
“I’m good. What have you been up to?”  
“Uh, well I uploaded a video earlier.”  
“Yeah? How’d it go?”  
“Fine,” Dan wanted to say a lot more than he did, and part of him hoped Phil would notice.  
“Really? What did people say?”  
Phil obviously suspected that Dan wasn’t telling the truth, so he didn’t bother lying.  
“People said I look tired.”  
“Are you?”  
Christ, even dead Phil knew Dan better than he knew himself.  
“Yeah. I guess.”  
“Mm.”  
Dan rubbed his palm against his sweatpants.  
“Phil, I miss you so much. I miss touching you. I miss hugging you and I miss seeing you smile,” Dan confessed.  
Phil cleared his throat.  
“Actually, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”  
“Yeah?”  
“Yeah. There’s another layer of this, but it’s not cheap. Maybe you’d benefit from it.”  
“What is it?”

…

A knock at the door made Dan jump. He stood up from his spot in front of the TV, and went to open his front door.  
He creaked the door open to greet two FedEx employees with a large box at their feet.  
“Delivery for Dan Howell?” A man holding dressed in a FedEx uniform said.  
“Uh, yes that’s me.”  
“Sign here please.”  
Dan signed his first and last name in barely legible handwriting, and signed the pen and clipboard back to his postman.  
“Where do you want this?” A woman with pinned up hair standing behind the man asked, gesturing towards the large box on the floor in front of her.  
“Uh, if you could put it in my bedroom for now that’d be great. It’s this way,” Dan half muttered, and he made his way to his room. The two picked up the box and carried it in the direction Dan was heading.

Once the box large enough to fit a person in was on his bedroom floor, Dan smiled and thanked the postmates for their help. He locked the door behind them once they had left, and carefully made his way back to the mysterious box in his bedroom.  
He grabbed a knife from the kitchen on his way back and placed it on top of the box. He sat on his knees and took out his phone. He needed Phil to be there, so he called him.

“Hey, did it come?”  
“Yeah.”  
“Open it.”  
Dan placed his phone on the floor next to him, and shakily took the knife in his hand.  
He pierced the tape with it, and carefully sliced it open.  
His hands were shaking and he was sweating, but he wasn’t entirely sure why he was so nervous.  
Neither Dan or Phil said anything. Both of them knew there was no need.  
When the box was opened, Dan peered inside.  
It was filled with packing peanuts, and underneath them were plastic bags filled with pale parts that made up a human.  
“It looks nothing like you,” Dan sighed.  
“No. It will, you have to activate it first.”  
“Oh.”  
Dan ran his finger over one of the packages. He pressed down on something that looked like a thigh, and it felt oddly human. It caved in like skin and muscle did, despite the fact it wasn’t made of anything remotely human like.  
“How do I do that?” Dan questioned.  
“You assemble it and put it in a warm bath. It should have come with electrolytes to go with it, too.”  
Dan inhaled heavily, and took out the bags and placed them on the floor.

Once the blank doll -what could you even call it- had been put together, Dan hauled it to the bathtub. It was like dealing with a corpse, and he couldn’t help but feel gross hauling the damn thing around.  
He ran the bath, making sure the water was warm.  
“You’re sure this is a good idea?” Dan said over the running water.  
“Honestly?”  
“Honestly.”  
“No, I’m not.”  
Dan laughed. “Wow, thanks.”  
“But it could help, a lot. We can actually see each other again, which would be good for both of us. We can have breakfast together just like we used to.”  
“Yeah, I guess you’re right,” Dan adjusted his hair.  
“It smells a bit of marshmallow,” Dan leaned over the bathtub.  
“Yeah, that’s the nutrient gel. It stops the synthetic muscle from dying out.”  
“Whatever that means,” Dan rolled his eyes. “You always smelled of marshmallow.”  
“Did I?” Phil giggled.  
“Yeah,” Dan smiled fondly. “You did.”

He waited in silence for the bath to fill up, and once it did he switched the faucet up and picked up a small envelope of electrolytes that came in the package.  
“Do I pour the whole thing in?”  
“Yeah.”  
Dan ripped the paper open, and poured it in the warm bath water evenly.  
“Ew, it’s like fish food,” Dan cringed.  
“You know, when you were a kid you ate fish food,” Dan said after moment, placing the small bag on the ground next to his knees.  
Phil laughed softly.  
Dan chuckled. “You thought it’d give you fishy super powers.”  
“Dan,” Phil said. “You don’t have to remind me of who I was, you know. Most of it is on the internet.”  
“Right, right. Sorry.”

Dan swirled the water around with his hand. It bubbled and fizzed, but not to the point of being alarming.  
“Do I just leave it?” Dan asked.  
“Yeah, it has to sit for a few hours, but it differs from person to person.”  
“Alright.” 

Dan got up and walked to his bedroom. He pulled out a bright collared shirt from the closet, skinny jeans, boxers and mix-match socks from the dresser. He folded them neatly on top of each other and set them in a pile on the toilet lid. He hung three towels from the handle on the wall, for Phil to dry off with when he was awake. Phil always used three towels to dry himself off after a shower, so Dan figured that this would be no different.  
He opened the bedside drawer on Phil’s side of the bed, and pulled out his glasses that were sitting in their case. Phil had taken his contact lenses with him, but he left behind his glasses. Plus, Dan imagined that he’d need to see, even after he was dead. He ran back into the bathroom and carefully placed them on the pile of clothes he had left on the toilet.  
He shut off the bathroom light, and sat down on his bed.  
“Now what?” Dan asked.  
“You wait,” Phil replied. “But I have to go.”  
“No, don’t go, please,” Dan begged.  
“I’m sorry, Dan. I will see you in a bit, I promise.”  
“Okay,” Dan whined.  
“Make yourself busy. I love you.”  
Dan could’ve cried right then and there.  
“Okay, I love you too.” 

Phil hung up the phone, and Dan put his phone on the bed next to him. He ran his palms down his thighs, and looked around his bedroom.  
The only light in the apartment was the sun shining through the clouds and into the windows. The house had windows that stretched from the floor to the ceiling, and most of the walls were made up of glass.  
What was Dan to do now that he was left alone with his thoughts? He didn’t want to go on a walk outside, in the fear of leaving the thing in the bath alone.  
His mind was clouded with worries about Phil. Despite already spending money on the thing, he worried that bringing Phil back in physical form was a bad idea.  
But it was too late, wasn’t it?

Dan ended up deciding to clean his apartment.  
There was shit all over the floor, and the dishes had been piling up for weeks. Since there was nothing else to do, he decided that cleaning was his best chance of calming down. 

He cleaned absolutely everything.  
He scrubbed the toilets, cleaned the sinks, threw out anything he didn’t need, and by the end of the evening the place looked so much cleaner.  
The only thing that he didn’t touch was the en suite bathroom where he had left Phil, and anything that used to belong to him.  
He didn’t touch his clothes, or his belongings. He kept Phil’s broken phone locked in a drawer in the kitchen and his things exactly where they belonged.  
When Phil had been hit by the bus that killed him, he dropped his phone and it shattered against the road. 

The thing was though, that Phil didn’t die instantly.  
His legs were broken and he suffered blunt trauma to the head. He had severe internal bleeding in his abdomen, and two of his ribs were fractured, another one was broken. He was awake when he was lying there on the pavement, but the shock that overcame Phil’s body put him to sleep. He was rushed to the nearest hospital, but he barely made it into the doors of A&E. As soon as he was brought into the hospital, the cocktail of his injuries was enough to kill him.  
The doctors suspected that he felt everything, up until the point where he fainted. That fact alone kept Dan awake at night, and the idea of Phil screaming in pain gnawed at Dan’s conscious at every turn.  
Dan, being his flatmate and boyfriend, was the first to know. The doctors gave him Phil’s shattered phone, along with any other personal belongings Phil had on him at the time.  
He didn’t know what to do with them, so he just put them all in a drawer in the kitchen, and has never looked at them since.

Just as Dan put away the broom, he heard the hardwood floors of his apartment creak. He froze in his tracks, like a deer in the headlights, his eyes blank.  
Oh, fuck.  
Dan carefully turned around and forced his long legs to walk towards the sound. He knew exactly what was happening, but he refused to accept it. Not yet, anyway.  
The soft sound of somebody walking slowly got louder and louder, until Dan found himself completely frozen, standing eye to eye with the love of his life.

Phil’s shiny black hair was soaking wet, and his green-blue eyes behind his glasses were full with their usual kindness.  
He was wearing the clothes Dan put out for him, and he stood in his usual awkward and tall stance; his arms glued to his sides and his legs pinned to the floor. His pale skin seemed to glow in the hallway lights.

The two tall men stood in the hallway outside the kitchen, their eyes locked together.  
Dan studied the man standing in front of him, unable to move.  
Phil looked around at his surroundings and then back at Dan.  
“Hi, Dan.”  
God, he looked and sounded exactly like Phil.  
Dan knew that he, it, whatever was standing in front of him- wasn’t Phil. But God, did he want him to be.  
Phil cleared his throat, feeling the tense atmosphere in the air.  
“Um, hello?” Phil leaned over and waved a hand in front of Dan’s face.  
Dan didn’t say anything. He couldn’t. He was frozen in his spot on the floor, his heart beating a billion beats per minute, and his hands shaking.  
He wanted so desperately to run up to Phil and hug him and kiss him and do absolutely everything with him. But he found himself completely lost in the ocean that was Phil’s eyes.  
Phil’s wet hair dripped on his shoulders, making his shirt wet in the process.

“Shit,” Dan breathed. 

…

The sky faded into shades of purples and reds and yellows. The quiet had only gotten worse since Phil’s arrival, though.  
Dan and Phil sat on the couch, with what felt like an ocean of space in between them.  
Dan sat with his knees up against his chest, and his arms wrapped around his legs. He stared at Phil, who sat across from him with his hands on his knees.  
Both of them were highly aware of the dense silence that hung in the air.

“Come here,” Phil patted the couch cushion next to him. “I won’t bite.”  
“I’m okay here for now,” Dan’s voice shook as he spoke.  
He was sitting on the same couch as a dead man.  
He had it down in his head that he was never going to see his best friend ever again, but here he was.  
But it really wasn’t Phil, was it?  
Dan was stuck between two worlds.  
On one hand, Phil was dead, and had been for months. Phil was decomposing in the dirt with broken bones and hollow and dead eyes, thousands of miles away from Dan.  
But on the other, Dan had brought him back to life. He had played with life and death itself, and for what? A couple thousand pounds?  
Phil, or at least, a version of Phil, was sitting right in front of him. And if he wanted, he could’ve touched him. He could feel his breath on his skin, he could hear Phil speak, and he could see him.  
Dan found himself in the same pit that he had been in when Phil died.  
Nothing felt real. The sounds and events unfolding around him weren’t real, and neither was he. His mind and body felt completely separate, like he was watching himself through the eyes of someone else.

“Are you hungry?” Phil asked, trying desperately to fill the silence.  
“Are you?”  
“Well, no. I mean- I don’t need to eat, really. But I can.”  
“Oh,” Dan nodded.  
“But I can make us something, if you like.”  
“Uh, sure,” Dan wasn’t very hungry, but he was willing to eat something.  
Phil stood up, and Dan carefully followed him into the kitchen.  
The two kept their distance, despite the fact that in the past they were often right on top of each other. Dan was so shaken by Phil that he tried to stay as far away from his friend as possible.  
Phil opened the fridge, and then the pantry, and then the fridge again.  
“We don’t have much food, do we?” Phil pointed out.  
“No, I guess not. I need to go to the shops.”  
“Well, can we just order takeout?”  
Dan leaned up against the counter, and looked at Phil, who stood next to the fridge.

“How do you not care?” Dan shrugged.  
“What?”  
“Like, I mean,” Dan groaned. “You were just brought back from the dead, and you came back to your fragile and depressed boyfriend. You’re hardly you, and yet you’re you. You’re so much of you that it hurts. It’s like you don’t care that you’ve just played God.”  
Phil pushed his glasses up on his nose with his finger.  
“I don’t really know how to reply to that, to be honest.”  
Dan grunted in response, folding his arms like a child.  
“I mean, I’m hardly the one who played God here,” Phil gestured. “You’re the one who brought me back, aren’t you? And haven’t we been talking for weeks?”  
Phil was right, and both of them knew it.

“Dan,” Phil whined. “Can’t we just go back to the way it was before? I’m back from the dead, for Christ’s sake! We can order takeout and just talk, just like we used to,” He walked over to where Dan was, and put a hand on the counter behind him. Their eyes locked together, and Dan could feel Phil’s breath on his skin. “I’ve missed you, haven’t you missed me?”  
Dan broke the eye contact, and got up from his stance against the counter. He turned around and looked at Phil.  
“Yes Phil, I’ve missed you. But you can hardly blame me for being shaken from seeing my dead best friend standing and breathing in front of me, when barely even two months ago I saw you lying in a body bag at a hospital with a caved in skull,” Dan shot back.  
Phil looked at the ground, and nodded.  
“You’re right,” He admitted, putting his hands up and closing his eyes. “I’m sorry.”

The two stood quietly for a moment before Dan slid his phone out of his pocket.  
As quickly as it started, the argument was over.  
“What do you want to eat?” He asked, unlocking his phone.  
Phil smiled his usual crooked, fond smile at Dan.  
“How ‘bout Indian?” He suggested. “I’m thinking a samosa and a peshwari naan.”  
“Sure,” Dan chuckled, looking up the phone number for the closest Indian place near his apartment.  
It didn’t matter what Phil was craving, since he didn’t need to eat anyway.  
But the familiar feeling of ordering takeaway for two while Phil stood nearby made Dan happy and warm, so that was all that really mattered.

... 

“I could get used to this,” Dan teased as Phil did the dishes. He leaned up against the wall in kitchen as Phil stood over the sink, a few feet away.  
“What, me doing your chores for you?” Phil giggled over the running water.  
Dan faked a smile in response. He was trying his best to cover up the fact that Phil scared the living shit out of him, but he was sure that he wasn’t being very convincing.  
Phil dried off his hands with the towel that hung from the oven handle. He walked over to where Dan was standing, and looked down at him, despite Dan being taller. 

The two made eye contact, and Dan’s perfectly brown eyes got lost in Phil’s.  
The usual brightness and happiness of Phil’s eyes seemed oddly dead and grey. Despite the rest of him looking very much alive, somehow his eyes seemed to be seperate. They were what Dan imagined a corpse’s eyes to be like, but these dead eyes stared back at his.  
Dan reached for Phil’s cheek, and held his face in his hand.  
His vampire like skin seemed to be perfectly smooth, like he was made of porcelain. But he could feel the underlying warmth of him, so he had to be real.  
Slowly, Dans’ hand made its way to Phils’, and he held his palm against his.  
Smooth.  
Phil didn’t seem to have fingertips at all. His skin was perfectly smooth and soft. And while Phil usually did have freakishly smooth skin, it was never like this.

“How are you so smooth?” Dans’ voice almost broke.  
“It’s called texture mapping,” Phil replied, holding his hand up to Dans’. “The teeny tiny details are 2-d.”  
Dan ran his fingers against Phils’, not knowing what to say.  
“Does it bother you?”  
“No,” Dan lied, shaking his head. His lip quivered, and his voice was soft.  
“Yes,” He croaked.

Dan felt himself begin to cry.  
“Fuck,” he groaned, and without even thinking he wrapped his arms around Phil.  
He nuzzled his nose into Phil’s chest, staining his shirt with tears.  
Phil rest his head on Dan’s, feeling his curls against his chin. He held Dan with his usual warmth and tightness, and kept him there, as if he were to let go then the world would end.  
The two boys stood in the kitchen, holding each other with every ounce of love that they had.  
“Shh, I know, I know,” Phil hushed. “It’s okay.”  
But that only made Dan hold him tighter and sob harder. He gasped for air, his fingernails grasping at Phil’s shirt. His knees felt weak, and Phil had to hold him up, otherwise he would drop to the floor.  
Phil ran his fingers through Dan’s now messy and curly chestnut hair, and closed his eyes. He wanted to rub Dan’s back to comfort him, but he knew that if he did he’d lose his grip and Dan would fall. He could feel every ounce of his weight in his arms, but he didn’t dare complain for a second. The sheer vulnerability of Dan made Phil’s heart almost flutter.  
Dan cursed himself for letting himself be so fragile, but it didn’t matter. He was alone with his best friend, safe in his arms. He felt like glass, ready to shatter at any moment.

The London night sky wasn’t normally forgiving, but tonight it felt like it could be.

…

Dan’s face was still stained with tears when he went to bed. His eyes were red and puffy, and his cheeks were rosy.  
Phil followed him to bed, and got under the covers on the left side of the bed. They both had changed into pajamas, and got comfortable under the bedsheets.  
Dan left the lamp on his nightstand on, but turned off every other light in the room. He rolled over to look at Phil, and propped himself up on his elbows.  
Phil looked back at him, staying on his back in order not to mess up his glasses.  
He looked at Dan as if he was expecting him to say something. But he didn’t, instead Dan positioned himself so that he hovered over Phil, propping himself up with his elbow and letting his legs intertwine with his. He leaned over until his nose touched Phils’, and hesitated for a moment.  
Dan closed his eyes, and kissed Phil with the softest lips he could manage. Phil put his hands on the shaved part of Dan’s hair, and breathed in through his nose. Dan pulled away, and looked at Phil again, trying not to cry again.  
He rolled over on top of Phil until he was lying on him, but also careful not to crush him under his own weight. Their legs tangled together under Dan’s blanket, and their chests pressed against each other.  
Dan kissed Phil again, this time holding his face with a gentle hand.  
God, he felt so much like Phil.  
It was strange how some random site on the internet pinpointed exactly what Phil’s lips felt like, exactly what he tasted like, and exactly how Phil reacted to being kissed. It was almost uncanny.  
Or maybe, Dan had forgotten what Phil was really like, and was now replacing him with the man underneath him.  
The thought made Dan’s heart skip a beat out of guilt. He prayed that wasn’t the case.

“Phil,” Dan whispered, pulling away. He ran his fingers through Phils’ strangely soft hair, looking into his dead eyes as they stared back at him, waiting for him to say something. “Hold me.”  
Most people upon seeing their dead spouse again would immediately want to have sex, but not Dan. At least, not that night. Yes, Dan loved sex. It belonged on the long list of things he missed about Phil, but he wasn’t in the mood that night. All he wanted was to feel Phil’s strangely smooth skin on his own. He wanted Phil’s arms to wrap around him, and he wanted to feel safe and warm in his bed again.  
Dan wanted nothing more than to sleep in the warmth of somebody else. He wanted to fall asleep to the even beat of Phil’s heartbeat- even if he knew that it was artificial. 

Dan rolled off Phil, and faced his back towards him. Phil took off his glasses and placed them on the nightstand before following Dan, and wrapped his arms around him. He buried his nose into Dan’s back, intertwined his own legs with Dans’, and closed his eyes. Dan carefully reached over and pulled the chain on his lamp, making the room go dark.  
Dan, for the first time since Phil died, felt safe. He felt warm, like the planets had aligned in his favor again. His bed was no longer empty, and he realized that he would never have to sleep alone again.  
“Don’t ever leave me again,” Dan mumbled, keeping his eyes closed.  
“I won’t,” Phil whispered back, his voice slightly muffled by Dan’s shirt. “I promise.”

The even sound of Phil’s breathing lulled Dan to sleep. Deep down he knew for a fact that the man holding him wasn’t Phil, but rather, a robot of sorts. Despite the fact that he had every trait that made him human- every trait that made him Phil- he wasn’t. His skin and his eyes were so disgustingly human. It made sense, he was made to seem real. Every bone in Dan’s body was telling him that it wasn’t Phil, but that didn’t stop him from falling in love with him all over again. 

…

“Good morning,” Dan said, freeing himself from Phil’s soft grasp as he rolled over to look at him.  
“Mm,” Phil groaned, keeping his eyes shut.  
Dan set his forehead on Phil’s, and their noses touched. They could not be closer if they tried, and neither of them complained. Dan ran his fingers through Phil’s hair, taking note of the feeling so that he wouldn’t forget it later. He knew that Phil wasn’t going anywhere, but the fear of losing him again still grasped onto him.  
“What time is it?” Phil asked, the words getting stuck in his tired and croaky throat.  
“Late,” Dan replied. The last thing that he wanted to do was roll over and check the time, he wanted to stare at Phil.  
“Very helpful, thank you,” Phil blinked his eyes open.  
Dan chucked to himself, and watched as Phil rolled over and put on his glasses. He clicked on Dan’s phone, checking the time.  
“It’s almost noon,” He groaned, rolling back over to Dan.  
“Mm,” Dan was so lost at the sight of Phil that he couldn’t have been bothered to listen.  
“We should get up.”  
“Mmm hmm.”  
“It’ll be sunset before we know it.”  
“Uh huh.”  
Phil smiled to himself, and sat up. He grabbed his pillow from underneath him, and hit Dan over the head with it.  
“Hey!” Dan laughed, smiling like an idiot. He put his arm over his face, and Phil hit him again.  
“Okay, okay! I’m awake!” Dan yelled. Phil giggled, sticking his tongue out between his teeth. He stood up from the bed, throwing the pillow at Dan.  
“Take a shower and get dressed,” Phil said, making his way towards the wardrobe on the other side of the room.  
Dan weakly looked up at Phil, suddenly feeling cold and empty now that Phil had left his immediate company.  
“Or maybe we can just lie in bed,” He suggested, a smug grin on his face.  
Phil ran his fingers through his hair and laughed.  
“How did you survive without me?” He joked.  
Dan wanted to say that he didn’t, but he didn’t want to break the casual feeling between him and his friend. 

Phil opened the closet door, looked inside for a moment, and turned to look at Dan again.  
“Dan?”  
“Yeah?”  
“Do I have a phone?”  
The question seemed to come out of nowhere. Dan furrowed his eyebrows out of curiosity. “Why?”  
Phil shrugged.  
“I don't know, I just thought it would be useful if I ever needed to contact you. I did have a phone, right?”  
“Yeah,” Dan started up at Phil for a moment, and sat up, resting against the headboard. “Yeah, you did. The hospital gave it to me, and it’s in the kitchen drawer. It’s shattered, but I don’t know if it still works. I haven’t checked.”  
Phil took off his pajamas and put on a black sweater and skinny jeans in their place. Dan watched from his bed, taking note on the details of him. He wasn’t sure why he was so surprised to see that Phil looked just the way he used to.  
The way he moved seemed so familiar. It seemed that every single detail of Phil was jot down and replicated in the man standing in his place.  
“I don’t know if you could even unlock it,” Dan continued, standing up from his bed. “You don’t have fingerprints, and it’s not like you know your password.”  
“I guess not,” Phil replied, looking in Dan’s full body mirror on the wall once he was dressed. He combed his hair to the side with his fingers, paying attention to every strand. Dan sleepily walked behind Phil, and wrapped his arms around his sides, and adjusted the hem of his sweater. He rested his head on Phil’s shoulder, and looked at him in the mirror.  
“You’re so pretty,” Dan commented, fondness in his eyes.  
Phil smiled a crooked smile back.  
“Not as pretty as you, Howell,” Phil put his hands on Dan’s and turned around. He held Dans’ left hand with his own, and ran his other hand down Dan’s jawline. He kissed him, like it was the most normal thing in the world.  
Dan supposed, that in a way, it was.

“Get dressed,” Phil said again, stepping away from Dan. “I’ll be in the lounge,” He opened the door, and left the room. He dragged the door shut behind him as he left.  
Dan put his hands in the pockets of his pajama pants, and he felt himself blush.  
He felt strangely out of place, but at the same time he felt like he was exactly where he was meant to be.  
It was strange, seeing Phil in such a good mood in the mornings. Before when he woke up he was a monster; he’d scoff at every noise and refuse to do anything that was asked of him. Once he had a cup of coffee, though, his mood would return to his normal and happy self. Dan would say something, but he appreciated Phil not trying to bite his head off at every turn.

As Phil told him to do, Dan took a shower and got dressed. His cheeks had gone red from the hot shower, and his curly hair was still damp by the time he left his room. He rolled the sleeves up on his loose jumper and walked out into the lounge, finding Phil sitting on the couch waiting for him. He was sitting with his legs crossed, and his hands in his lap.  
“Hey,” Dan said, stopping at the edge of the room. “You want breakfast?”  
“What do we have?” Phil turned his head, trying to hide the fact that Dan had made him jump slightly.  
“Cereal, and that’s about it. We have a couple bowls worth of my Crunchy Nut, if that’s okay.”  
“That’s fine.”  
Dan stood with his hands in his jean pockets for a moment before nodding and walking out of the room towards the kitchen.  
“I’ll be back.”  
Phil just sat on the couch with his legs crossed, pulling at the loose thread on the couch cushion.

Dan eventually brought two bowls of cereal back into the lounge, and handed one to Phil. The metal spoons clang against the colorful bowls as Dan walked, and he tried to avoid spilling milk and cereal all over the floor. He sat down on the loveseat across from Phil, and took a bite of his cereal.  
Phil didn’t lift his spoon, instead he looked at Dan. He looked as if he was expecting something, or if he was surprised, like Dan had done something wrong.  
“What?” Dan asked, his mouth full.  
Phil inhaled sharply and shook his head, taking a spoonful of cereal.  
“Nothing. I just thought you’d sit next to me is all.”  
Dan shook his head, mostly out of annoyance. This Fake Phil, so to speak, was obviously made for Dan to think he was Phil, but Dan was getting the impression that Phil didn’t know Phil very much. Whatever, Dan decided, he’d learn. He just had to be patient, even if he was the most impatient person in the world.  
The two ate their cereal on their respective couches in silence. 

Dan felt weird.  
It was weird.  
The morning felt awkward, and Dan wondered if it was his fault. Maybe he had gotten so used to waking up to an empty apartment that having somebody around felt out of place. Especially knowing that the ‘somebody’ in his house wasn’t human at all. He had almost settled into the idea of never seeing Phil ever again, and yet here he was in front of him, making everything feel weird.  
He had all the qualities that made him human, yes, but none of the qualities that made him alive. Fire was more alive than he was.  
The thought crossed his mind to just suck Phil’s dick so then he’d have something to do, but he quickly dismissed it.  
But it wasn’t a bad idea, per se.  
Maybe later.

Phil placed his finished bowl of cereal on the coffee table, and Dan stood up and took the bowls into the kitchen. When he came back, Phil was still sitting in the same spot he left him in.  
“I’m going out,” Dan said, grabbing his phone off the couch.  
“Where?”  
“Tesco. We’re out of food,” Dan adjusted his hair. “And while you don’t need to eat, I do. I’ll be back later.”  
“Can I come?” Phil asked, completely innocently. Yet another thing that he thought was totally normal and not at all weird.  
Dan, without even thinking, scoffed at him. “Are you kidding?”  
Phil only blinked.  
“Phil,” Dan sat down next to him, looking into his dead eyes. “You can’t come with me. Not anywhere.”  
“Why not?”  
It was such an obvious question that Dan didn’t even know how to water it down in order to explain it.  
“Because, Phil,” He rolled his eyes. “You’re dead. Ever think about that? A dead man, walking around London. Don’t you think that’s weird? What if a friend of ours saw us?”  
Phil looked down at his lap.  
“And not to mention, people all over the internet know who we are, and even more people know that you’re supposed to be dead. If somebody saw us and recognized us, you wouldn’t be the only one who would have some explaining to do. How in the hell am I supposed to explain how my dead friend is suddenly strolling along next to me? Phil, if somebody sees us, and God forbid recognizes us, then that’s the end. The FBI will come in and do experiments on us, and I’ll get in huge, huge trouble. With my friends, our friends, people I work with, my family, your family, people who look up to me, and not to mention the entirety of the internet.”  
Dan shook his head.  
“Point is, Phil, that you can’t come with me to any public place. This whole thing has to be a secret. You got it?”  
Phil nodded, and Dan placed his hand on Phil’s thigh.  
“Good,” Dan stood up, and grabbed his wallet and keys from the coffee table where he had left them a few days earlier.  
“I’ll be back in a couple of hours,” Dan leaned over the couch, and kissed Phil on the nose. “Keep yourself busy. The remote’s over there, and your phone is in one of the drawers in the kitchen if you want to see if it still works. My laptop is in my bedroom, in case you want to watch porn or something,” Dan chuckled to himself. “But don’t post anything, anywhere. I’ll be back.”  
Dan ran down the stairs, and left.  
It was the first time he’d left the house in weeks, but it was strange to know that he for once wasn’t leaving behind an empty apartment.

The Underground was only a few blocks away, so he always walked when he need to get somewhere.  
On the way, though, was the road that Phil was hit on.  
When Dan had to cross it, his spine shivered.  
The image of Phil collapsing against the ground like a ragdoll was burned into his brain. His time alone allowed for time to daydream over every single detail of Phil’s death. He pictured the way his broken legs bent in ways that shouldn’t be possible. He imagined the way his head hit the road that could make the toughest person cringe. He imagined the way he turned his hands into fist to vent his pain into something, no matter so miniscule. He could almost hear Phil’s scream of agony, despite the fact that he didn’t see any of it happen.  
Despite never seeing him on the ground unconscious, he knew that other people had. And he knew that this very road was where it happened.  
Just outside his apartment.  
I need to move.

…

Dan creaked his front door open, carrying fabric grocery bags in his arms. He held the door open with his foot, and carefully stepped in, trying not to drop anything. The warm lights of his apartment glowed against the hazel shine of the wooden floors, and Dan’s shoes clicked against them as he walked.  
Once he had made his way to the kitchen, Dan threw the grocery bags on the kitchen island. He exhaled a shaky breath, tired from hauling heavy bags up the stairs.  
“I’m home,” He called to a seemingly empty house. When nobody replied, he threw his keys on the counter next to the groceries, and looked around.  
“Phil?” Dan called as he walked up the stairs to his bedroom. When he found that the lights were off, he turned around and tried to find Phil. He didn’t seem to be anywhere.  
“Phil?” He called again, louder this time. Just as Dan was about to panic, he noticed lights shining from underneath a closed door.  
The door to the gaming room.

Before Phil died, he shared a gaming channel with Dan. The thing was more active than either of their main channels combined, since making videos for it didn’t require much thought or effort. Sure, editing was a grueling process, but it was still fun to make casual videos with his best friend that people seemed to genuinely enjoy.  
He and Phil had reserved an entire bedroom just for filming gaming videos, with a desk and a gaming setup, with two office chairs, one for each of them. On the other side of the room there was a futon that was often decorated with plushies or Christmas decorations during December. On one of the walls there were shelves that remained out of shot from the camera with a collection of random crap that Dan and Phil owned that didn’t belong anywhere else in the house. Underneath the shelves a DDR pad leaned up against the wall that Dan had bought years ago, but had never really used. It remained in the background of his gaming videos, since it was almost never touched.

Since Phil died, Dan hadn’t touched the gaming room. He’d never uploaded on the gaming channel, as it would’ve been depressing to just turn “DanAndPhilGames” into “JustDanGames”. And not to mention, the videos wouldn’t be nearly as funny or enjoyable if Dan just made them himself. 

“Phil?” Dan creaked the door open, his hands trembling.  
When Dan peered inside, Phil turned his head towards him. He was sitting at the desk, and was presumably on the computer.  
“What are you doing?” Dan sighed, feeling the fear in his eyes turn to sadness.  
“I’m playing a game,” Phil replied. “Should I not have been?”  
Dan ran his fingers through his hair to calm himself down.  
“No, no.” He shook his head. “I just- what are you playing?”  
“Fortnite,” Phil replied, turning back towards the screen.  
“Oh.”  
Phil at one point had an addiction to Fortnite, to the point where you could hear him swearing at the screen from five miles away. He’d play all day and and all night, and it was strange to see him still playing. Even in death. It was oddly funny, and typical of Phil to spend his afterlife of sorts playing video games.  
“How’d you get in here?”  
“I opened the door.”  
Dan laughed, but you could hear the sadness in it.  
“No, asshole, I mean, how’d you know what was even in here?”  
“I got bored, so I started snooping. Why didn’t you tell me we had a huge gaming setup at our disposal?” Phil giggled. “Oh, and my phone doesn’t work. Even if it did I reckon I’d just cut my fingers on the glass anyway.”  
“Ah,” Dan nodded.  
It was strange to hear Phil not be aware of the fact that he used to have a gaming channel. It was like he had never even lived his own life. But really, he hadn’t, had he?  
Before Dan could notice the dust on the desk and the empty tripod that sat on the desk behind the monitor, he turned to leave.  
“Well, uh, have fun with that,” Dan said as he closed the door.  
Phil didn’t reply, as he was too focused on the game in front of him.

Dan leaned against the wall, and shut his eyes. He could feel his heart beating up against his chest, and he took a very shaky deep breath in order to calm down.  
Yet another thing he missed about Phil: making videos with him.  
While he had, in a sense, gotten Phil back, nobody else had. He wasn’t the only one who missed him, but he was the only one who got to see him again. It was almost selfish, wasn’t it? While he could touch and see him, he couldn’t live the YouTube duo life with him anymore, like he wanted to. He couldn’t go to conventions with him anymore. He couldn’t make a video with him for no other reason than that he felt like it.  
It was sickening.

Before Dan had a chance to get upset over it, he shuffled into the kitchen to put away the groceries.  
…

Dan was lying on top of his covers, playing on Twitter. His bed wasn’t made, so his long legs got tangled with the loose blanket underneath him. He was almost absent mindlessly browsing on his phone, not paying much attention to the words that scrolled across his screen.  
The lights in Dans’ room were dim. The curtains draped over the windows, blocking the moonlight from shining into his bedroom. The air in the house could almost have been described as cold, but it was comfortable. 

Dan heard the door click open, and he looked up from his phone to see Phil standing in the doorway. His hair was pulled back, and his glasses rested perfectly on his nose. Dan sat up to look at him.  
“Hey,” Phil greeted. He closed the door, and sat at the edge of the bed across from Dan.  
“Hey, you win Fortnite?” Dan teased.  
“No,” Phil smiled it as if it was obvious. It was.  
“There are a million people out for your blood, and I had no idea what I was doing. It’s near impossible,” Phil sighed.  
“Technically, there are only 99 people out for your blood, you know.” Dan chuckled.  
“Oh shut up,” Phil giggled in response, rolling his eyes. 

Dan smiled fondly at Phil.  
“Come ‘ere,” Dan put his arms out, inviting Phil to nestle up next to him.  
Phil followed, and put his head on Dan’s perfectly flat chest. He wrapped his arms around his side, and Dan held Phil on top of him.  
“What’d you do today, other than lose horribly at Fortnite, that is?”  
“Hey,” Phil scoffed. “It wasn’t that brutal.”  
Dan laughed, and then so did Phil.  
“Well, when you left I looked for my phone. I tried to get it on, but it didn’t work. So I tried plugging it in, but that didn’t go any good either. So I just gave up and decided it was a lost cause. Um, then I watched some weird reality TV show for a bit, then I started snooping. I watered some plants, cleaned up some mysterious papers that somehow got behind bookshelves, and tried to organize the wires behind the TV but eventually just gave up. Then I found the gaming room and spent the rest of the night there.”  
“Yeah?” Dan rubbed his thumb up and down Phil’s back.  
He put his hand on Dan’s chest and rested his chin against it. “Mm hmm.”

Dan slid his hand under Phil’s shirt.  
Phil propped himself up off of Dan and onto his elbow so that he floated next to him. He leaned in until his glasses began to slide down his nose, and he took a moment to look at Dan’s perfectly chocolate eyes.  
Everyone always said that brown eyes were boring, but not Dans. Somehow they were full of color, while at the same time they weren’t. They held all of his secrets and love, all of his hatred and his sadness. You could see how tired he was just by looking at them, which always made him feel a bit exposed and vulnerable. But Phil adored the truthfulness that he always carried with him, and he knew him so well that he always knew immediately whether he was lying or not. His eyes always held every answer to any question he could possibly ask.

He saw the anticipation and love on Dan’s face, so he closed his eyes, and kissed him. Dan kissed him back, and put on hand in the groove of Phil’s back and the other on his neck.  
Dan seemed to latch onto Phil, and he kissed him hard.  
“Do you want to?” Phil took a breath.  
Dan nodded quickly, and pulled Phil’s lips onto his. Phil’s lips were somehow always perfectly smooth, as was the rest of him. It was a nice contrast to Dan’s own lips, always cracked and dry. He wasn’t even sure why his lips were so chapped to begin with, he just never cared enough to keep applying chapstick to them. He was sure that Phil didn’t appreciate the rough feeling of Dan’s mouth, which almost motivated to actually take care of his skin.  
Almost.  
He bunched Phil’s shirt up around his hand, and he sat up and pulled away for a moment to lift his shirt over his head. He put both his hands on Phil’s face, and loosely wrapped his legs around him. 

Phil’s bare torso was covered in freckles. He didn’t really have freckles on his face, but his body was a galaxy of the places where the sun had kissed his skin. He never really was one to take his shirt off at the beach or at a pool side, and yet his body was a sky of stars; the kind you’d find if you drove out to the middle of nowhere, where the city lights didn’t pollute the air. You could look up in the dead of night and see every galaxy and constellation, and if you looked hard enough, you could see mars.  
That’s what Phil’s chest looked like.

Phil slid Dan’s loose shirt off, and Dan shivered at the suddenly cold air hitting his bare shoulders. He smiled through a kiss and unbuckled Phil’s belt, and sloppily threw the thing over the bed and on the floor. He unbuttoned his jeans, and unzipped his already loose fly.  
Dan’s nose scrunched up and his cheeks formed dimples in anticipation.

…

That night, Dan had the best sex of his entire life.  
It was loving.  
It was hot.  
It was perfect.  
He could almost say that he was better at sex than he was before, which was weird, but he would be the last one to complain.  
Phil always knew Dan’s body like it was the back of his hand, and he knew exactly how to make him scream. The same was true that night.

When the two lied down to sleep, they held each other closer than they ever thought possible. Nearly every inch of them was touching, and Dan could feel Phil’s pulse on his skin.  
He’d never get over how strange it was that a dead man had a pulse.  
Dan slept with his head on Phil’s chest, Phil’s chin resting in Dan’s curly hair. Phil held him as if letting go would be deadly, and he went out of his way to make sure he was the most comfortable that he could’ve been.  
Once his heart had slowed down, and his stomach had stopped turning over, Dan slept better than he had in years. He melted into Phil’s chest, and disappeared into the ocean of his duvet. His eyes were glued shut, and he was in a completely different world.  
He wouldn’t have gotten up for the world. He wouldn’t have left Phil’s arms even if the world was ripping in half.  
“I love you so much,” Dan muttered, half asleep. He worried that he had said nothing at all, as he was so tired that he very well could’ve been dreaming.  
Dan was usually never the one to say it. He would a lot when he was younger, when his relationship with Phil was new. But now he didn’t feel the need to, since they both already knew it. There were a million and one reasons to say “I love you,” and Dan had said every single one, at some point or another.  
Dan’s concern was erased when Phil leaned forward and kissed the top of Dan’s head.  
“I love you too,” Phil fluttered. He nuzzled his nose into Dan’s messy sex hair, and indirectly breathed in his shampoo.  
Dan felt himself smile like an idiot. 

...

Dan had been invited to a party.  
His friend, Tom, had recently moved into a new office and was having a party to celebrate.  
He had two employees for what could be called a company, that made sketch comedy videos for his YouTube channel. His old office was rubbish and there was always something wrong with it, so he decided to move.  
Tom invited a bunch of his friends over for pizza, including Dan. The two were never close, and when they talked it was always in a group. At a YouTube convention or at a party that Dan and Phil had both been invited to, it was always in groups. Regardless, Dan enjoyed Tom’s company, and Tom enjoyed his. 

But today, Dan had been invited on his own. Of course, there would be other people there, other friends of Tom’s, and people that Dan knew as well. But he’d have to walk around by himself, with Phil not attached to his side the whole time. It’d be weird.  
It would be the first time that Dan went to a social outing by himself, without Phil. He had his own copy of him at home, but he couldn’t bring him anywhere.

At first, Dan didn't want to go at all. He would rather just sit opposite Phil for hours, them both mindlessly browsing the internet for hours without saying a word to each other. Phil would sit at his laptop, and Dan would sit at his. They’d both unconsciously sink further and further into the sofa crease until their necks ached from looking up for so long.  
But he’d done that every day this week. He and his therapist both agreed that going out would be good for him. She of course had no idea that he had brought Phil back from the dead. It wasn’t the sort of thing you could just casually bring up. And plus, Dan worried that it was slightly illegal. He knew it wasn’t, but it still felt weird. It was a secret that he’d have to take with him to the grave.  
Still, Dan trusted his therapist. She was a sweet middle aged woman with pictures of her two kids on her desk. Sixteen year old twins. Girls. Pictures of her husband were placed on her desk as well, one being a picture of the two on their wedding day, almost 20 years ago. Her hair was gray at the roots, but she dyed over it every few weeks dark brown. She held herself so effortlessly, and her eyes were always full with a certain sympathy and kindness that made Dan feel as if he could tell her almost anything.  
She wasn’t a threat by any means, but somehow Dan still held the secret of Phil from her. He wasn’t even sure why.

When the clock stroke 8, Dan stood up from his spot on the couch. He had been playing a video game on Steam, and hadn’t stood up from his spot in front of his laptop for hours. He closed his thin macbook and picked it up, carrying it to his bedroom. Dan felt himself go a little light headed from standing up so fast, his long legs almost tripping over themselves. He took a second to collect himself, aware of Phil’s gaze from across the lounge.  
Dan threw his laptop onto the edge of his bed, and it bounced against the soft sheets. He grabbed a pair of shoes from the neat pile he had made in the corner of his room and sat down on the bed to put them on. Dan slid out of his bedroom, turning off the light as he did. He walked into the lounge to grab his jacket that sat on the couch, next to where he had been sitting. It had been sitting in the same spot since he went out last week, since he never bothered to put it away.

“Going somewhere?” Phil raised an eyebrow, watching Dan carefully.  
“I’ve got a party at Tom’s,” Dan slid his coat on, letting the zipper hang unzipped.  
“Who?”  
“Tom,” Dan’s suddenly sad eyes scanned over to meet Phil’s. “You know him.”  
“Right,” Phil nodded, careful not to make Dan upset. “Where’s it at?”  
“His new office.”  
“He moved?” Phil asked as if he knew who Tom was in the first place. His lies weren’t very convincing.  
“Yeah, a couple weeks ago,” Dan stood with his hands in his pockets.  
“Will there be food?” Phil smiled.  
“Phil, you ask too many questions,” Dan shook his head, a soft smile curling at his lips.  
Dan head for the door, but he turned towards Phil the sound of his voice before he reached the exit to the lounge.  
“Can I come with?” Phil turned around, putting his arm up on the couch.  
Dan felt the life from his eyes drain.  
“No, Phil. Do I really need to have this conversation with you again?”  
Phil said nothing.  
“You’re dead. Dead people don’t go out to parties. Or grocery stores. Or anywhere,” Dan leaned in. His voice rang with a deafening coldness. “Dead people don’t go anywhere, Phil.” 

Dan turned and headed down the stairs to leave. He heard his keys click in his jacket pocket and felt his hair bounce with every step. He was aware of Phil, sitting on the couch a floor above, with his dead, blue eyes staring at nothing, trying to collect himself after his encounter with Dan.  
He almost felt bad, and wanted to go back up and apologize. But before he could his keys were in the lock, and the chilly wind of the winter air was biting against the skin on his cheeks. 

…

Tom’s new office was bigger. It still had nic-nacs everywhere you looked, and it still felt like a YouTuber’s office. There was a gaming set-up and three separate desks that were all equally covered in stuff.  
On one of the walls was a huge bookshelf, that was filled with fan art and gifts that Tom had collected from his fans. He was one of the only people on YouTube who still had a P.O. box, which Dan always thought was weird.  
Behind the shelves was a wall of guns. Fake guns, of course, since they were very much illegal in England. Dan had a thing for guns, and often used them in skits of his.  
Tom’s new office was more colorful than his previous one, or maybe that was just because Dan had indirectly desaturated the memory of it.

When Tom opened the door after Dan knocked, his face had gone bright red from the cold air. It wasn’t even freezing out, but all of Dan’s blood always went straight to his face even in the slightest of temperature change.  
“Hey!” Tom beamed at the sight of his friend. His blue eyes scanned him up and down, and stepped aside for Dan to step inside.  
“Hey, Tom,” Dan smiled, reaching in for a hug after Tom had shut the door behind him.  
“How’ve you been?” Tom breaked away from Dan’s light embrace.  
“I’ve been,” Dan joked, avoiding the question.  
Tom chuckled, and it was unclear whether it was a laugh out of pity or not. Either way, Dan appreciated him not making it into a big deal like everyone else had.  
“Hey, well we’ve got pizza if you want any. Make yourself at home,” Tom smiled a genuine smile. He couldn’t have been more welcoming if he tried.  
Dan couldn’t help but wonder if he was doing it out of sympathy for Dan’s loss of Phil. He wondered if Tom even wanted to invite him in the first place, but he did anyway because he felt bad- because he thought Dan was lonely and desperately needed some kind of social interaction.  
But thinking that way was going to get him nowhere. So instead of awkwardly hovering in the corner, he walked over to the box of pizza that sat on what was presumably Tom’s desk that had been cleaned off to make room for food. Dan grabbed a piece of pepperoni pizza, and stood behind the couch where everyone else was talking to each other. 

Dan, surprisingly, found himself having a good time. He worried that everyone would ask about Phil, and that they’d definitely try and express their sympathy, which only made him feel worse. But nobody said anything about it. It was as if it had never happened.  
He caught up with old friends that he had met once or twice before, and actually got a chance to be in an engaging conversation with Tom. Well, as engaging as conversations at pizza parties got.  
People really seemed to want to talk to Dan, and even though he could see the concern in the eyes of those who were bad at lying, he still had a great time. He was grateful that he didn’t have to do any lying of his own, since he wasn’t so good at lying himself. You could always see right through him, as if he were translucent. He was, though, good at pretending he was fine. He could smile a fake smile that looked all too real, and nobody would ever bat an eye.

He was hardly even aware of the empty space that sat next to him. He filled the space with other friends besides Phil, and it felt good to just be Dan for a change.  
It was a good night. He had gone out as Dan Howell, and would return home as Dan, from Dan and Phil.  
He felt like Hannah Montana, but in a good way. 

Dan was the last one to leave. He stayed behind to stay goodbye to everyone, and after he waved his goodbyes to Tom, he headed outside to leave.  
But before he could make it far, Tom opened the door and called for him.  
Dan whipped his head around to look at him.  
“Dan,” Tom ran over to him. “Can I talk to you for a second?”  
“Sure,” Dan walked back across the street to meet Tom on the pavement outside his new office.  
“This is weird, but” Tom fiddled his thumbs. “I was wondering how you’ve been holding up, without Phil and all. I know that it’s a strange thing to ask. But I’ve been in the same boat, and I wanted to check if you were okay. Really, I mean.”  
Dan blinked in surprise. He supposed that he shouldn’t have been so shocked by the question, he had been dreading it all night. He just thought he would be safe once he made it out the door.  
It wasn’t so offensive though, coming from Tom, when they were alone. He had lost a close friend years ago to cancer, and it ended up driving him into a depression. It was normal for Tom to have been concerned. 

Normally, Dan would try and play it off by saying that ‘its been hard’ but he’s been ‘hanging in there’. But somehow, it didn’t feel appropriate. Saying that it had been hard would’ve been underestimating it. It would’ve been lying.  
‘Uh, It’s been,” Dan paused while Tom looked up at him, waiting patiently for an answer. “It’s been awful. It’s been fucking brutal, Tom.”  
He didn’t feel like lying. He had been for months. For some reason he felt like Tom was the only person he could say it to.  
“And it’s been weird. It’s like I’ve been ripped in two, to the point where I can’t tell whether I’m awake or dreaming. Sometimes I feel like I’m walking with my feet in two different dimensions entirely.  
“More than anything, though, I feel like I’m going crazy. I feel as if I’m going absolutely mad,” Dan reached up to fix his hair. “It’s unbearable. And I know I have reasons to not even be upset at all. But I’ve got about another million reasons to be miserable. It’s weird. It’s so weird.”  
Tom nodded in understanding. He obviously hadn’t been prepared for his answer, but he took it anyway.

“I’m overwhelmed with the feeling of being in charge,” Dan admitted. “I have to cook by myself, get myself in bed by myself, I have to be an adult entirely by myself. I’m like, what the hell am I supposed to do with this responsibility, you know?”  
Tom reached out to rub Dan’s shoulder.  
“Yeah, I know,” He agreed. He ran his hand down Dan’s arm, and tried to calm him down the best he could. Dan wasn’t riled up, per se, but he definitely wasn’t calm.  
“Dan,” Tom started. “I know it’s cheesy, and people say it a lot, but you have my number. You can call me whenever you want. I know exactly what you’re dealing with, unlike your aunt who you’ve only ever talked to at family gatherings who said the same thing.”  
That made Dan laugh.  
“But really, I’m here. I don’t even have to say anything, you can call me to rant for a while and then I’ll say one sentence back, and that can be it. If you want you can come over to my place and watch me play video games for two hours without saying a word to me. I can listen, or I can not. It’s really up to you.”  
Dan smiled back.  
“Thanks, Tom. I appreciate it. If I’m ever hongry, you’ll be the first to hear about it.”  
Tom shot him a questioning look.  
“It’s a mix between honry and angry,” Dan explained.  
Tom laughed, maybe a little bit too loud.  
“That’s brilliant,” he chuckled. 

“Well, I’ll hear from you?” Tom asked after a second.  
“Hopefully, yes.”  
Dan and Tom waved their goodbyes for a second time, before Tom went back inside to grab his things and head home. Dan walked across the street again, and headed towards stairs to the Underground that was about a 15 minute walk away.  
Dan had forgotten what it was like to lean on someone. He had Phil, and then he didn’t. Phil was no longer a person who knew every single detail about him. He was a shell of the person he used to be. He could listen to Dan when he cried, but he couldn’t talk his way out of it. He couldn’t tell him every single good thing he did after Dan cried that he was horrible. Nor could he point out what an idiot he was being when he was sad. Dan didn’t have tough love or pleasant chats to get his way out of his pits of sadness anymore. He had to get out of them mostly himself, while Phil watched.  
But he now realized that he didn’t have to.  
He had Tom, and he didn’t want to admit how much he was relieved by the idea of it.

…

When Dan got home, all the lights had been turned off.  
The sun had gone down hours ago, and so the apartment was pitch black, only being illuminated by the soft glow of his electronics that sat around his house.  
Dan had to turn on his phone flashlight in order to see where he was going, and his eyes squinted at the suddenly bright light.  
The only sound in the house was the soft creaking his feet made against the hardwood floor. His keys rang against the dining room table after Dan carelessly tossed from from his hands, and the sound echoed in the open air of his apartment. 

He turned off his flashlight before sliding open his bedroom door, and peered his head inside.  
Phil was bundled underneath the covers of his bed, his hair falling onto his pillow and his arms wrapped around part of the duvet that he held to his chest. He was dead asleep, and Dan creeped around the room, careful not to wake him.  
Dan peeled off his clothes, letting them loosely fall to the floor, leaving only his boxers behind. He quietly slipped underneath the covers, turning his back to Phil.  
He closed his already sleepy eyes, and let himself sink into the sheets underneath him.  
Phil rustled next to him, noticing Dan’s presence in the bed.  
“Hey,” Phil blinked.  
“Sorry, did I wake you?” Dan turned to look at Phil.  
Phil shook his head. “No,” He hummed.  
Phil kept his eyes closed, knowing that opening them would’ve done no good anyway. Even Dan couldn’t see in the darkness of their bedroom, and he had perfect vision, unlike Phil.  
“What time is it?” Phil grunted.  
“About 12.”  
“When did you get home?”  
“Just now,” Dan answered.  
“Mm,” Phil whispered. He lie still for a moment. Dan thought that he was going to go to sleep.  
“Did I tell you that I don’t need to sleep?”  
Dan blinked in confusion at his friend.  
“No.”  
“Well, I don’t. But I do anyway. I love sleeping, and I can, just like I can eat, even though I don’t need to.”  
Dan nodded, confused. “Right,” he furrowed his eyebrow.  
“I don’t know, There’s just something about being able to lie down and do nothing for hours, it’s so nice,” Phil paused. “And even though I don’t dream anymore, it’s fun to pretend like I do, and that I just forget them all in the morning.”  
Dan said nothing.  
“Do you think that’s what deja vu is? Just scraps of dreams that you’ve forgotten?”  
“I don’t know, Phil.”  
Phil turned his head to face the ceiling.  
“Or maybe it’s something bigger than that. Maybe the reason something that you’ve never experienced before seems so familiar is because you have lived it before. Maybe it’s your mind recalling something from a past life.”  
Dan blinked. Despite Phil’s voice sounding tired, his mind clearly was not. Despite being asleep mere seconds ago, he seemed to be wide awake.  
“Phil?”  
“Hm?”  
“Did you get bored when I was gone?” Dan suspected.  
He heard Phil exhale from his nostrils.  
“Yeah, I did,” he admitted.  
“You get bored every time I go out, don’t you?” Dan smiled.  
“Yeah,” Phil giggled. “Yeah, I guess I do.”  
Phil rolled over and placed his hand over Dan’s side.  
“Anyway,” Phil changed the subject. “How was the party?”  
Dan yawned. “How about we talk about it in the morning, yeah?”  
He secretly was hoping that Phil would forget to ask by the time the morning rolled around. He didn’t want to have to explain to Phil that he had a great time without him. Phil wasn’t a jealous person, if anything Dan was the jealous one. But he still felt bad, since he had appreciated Phil not being there. He didn’t want to admit it to himself, much less to Phil.  
“Right, right. Sorry,” Phil replied, clearly not wanting to say goodnight yet.  
Dan rolled over again, facing his back toward Phil. They slept with Phil’s arm loosely draped over Dan, and Dan hugging a pillow with both arms.  
As quickly as Phil was awake, he was asleep again. 

But Dan stayed up, thinking about his night.  
He thought about what Tom had said, and about what he said to him.  
He cursed himself for letting himself be so vulnerable around someone he barely knew. But he could barely blame himself, seeing as the only person who knew everything about him couldn’t even be described as being alive. The only person he would trust with his life couldn’t even be trusted with his own, apparently. Everything that made him human was gone.  
But Dan had had this inner dialogue with himself about a million times.  
So instead of staying awake, staring at his bedroom wall, he slept. He closed his eyes, let himself drift ever so slowly into sleep. His body lie perfectly still, his eyes glued shut and his fingers gripped at the frizzy, curly hair on his head.  
And he dreamt about nothing - nothing at all.

…

Dan woke up with lines on his cheeks from the fabric on his pillow.  
The soft hum of warm water hitting the ceramic of the shower echoed from the bathroom that attached to Dan’s bedroom, and the harsh afternoon sunlight shone through the window.  
The sun felt warmer on Dan’s bare shoulders that morning, and he welcomed the arrival of spring on the horizon.  
He rolled over and took note of how the sheets next to him had been sloppily thrown to the side. His eyes were heavily with tiredness, and his body seemed to be pinned to his bed. He didn’t want to move, or do anything. His eyes glazed over, listening to the water running in the room next to him. His eyes loosely focused on his curtains, his eyelids almost burning at the bright sunlight.  
Dan buried his face in his elbow, ignoring the bright and harsh world that surrounded him.  
He took note on how the shower water shut off.  
Dan’s head began to pound, and on a normal day it would be ignorable.  
But today, what would normally be a light headache, turned into a pounding, unbearable ache. He scrunched his face, trying to vent his pain into something.  
Dan felt his thoughts from the night before begin to bubble. His mind went over every single feeling of doubt he had felt ever since he’d signed up for Serenity.  
He felt miserable, and the day had hardly even begun. 

The bathroom door opened after what seemed like hours, and Dan imagined Phil stepping out with dripping wet hair and one towel around his waist, and another around his shoulders.  
He pretended to be asleep, wishing that he was.  
He heard Phil walking around the room, probably arranging an outfit for the day.  
Dan’s pretending didn’t last long, as his hand twitched out of reaction to the pain in his skull.  
Phil froze, looking over at Dan that lie on the bed.  
“Dan?” He said, cautiously.  
Dan said nothing, not even a grunt. He was too exhausted to do absolutely anything.  
“Are you awake?” Dan imagined Phil straightening his back, looking at Dan with that sickening concern in his eyes.  
Dan managed to sputter out gibberish, that hardly sounded like anything.  
“Dan, are you okay?”  
Dan began to feel anger swirl in his stomach, but managed to keep it down. He lifted his arm from his face, and he squinted at Phil, that stood near the closet across the room with only a pair of bright pink boxers on and a beige towel wrapped around his shoulders.  
Dan only looked over at him, annoyance swirling in his eyes.  
“What’s wrong?” Phil lowered his arms, a piece of fabric hanging in his fingers.  
“Put on some trousers on and I’ll tell you,” Dan grunted, rolling over onto his stomach, and stuffing his face into his pillow.

Phil did as he was told, taking a moment to slip on a graphic t-shirt and black skinny jeans. He walked over to his bed, and sat down on the edge of it, as close to Dan as he could be.  
He reached his hand over to rub Dan’s bare back, and Dan shivered from his cold palms.  
“Dan,” he sighed, concern in his voice.  
“God, Phil!” Dan growled after a moment, lifting his eyes up to meet Phil’s. His anger seemed to come from nowhere. “What is it? What could it possibly be? This early in the fucking morning?”  
If he could’ve, surprise would’ve flickered in Phils’ normally bright eyes. But his dull pupils only stared at Dan that sat beneath him. He drew his hand back, and curled it into a loose fist against his chest. The confusion on his face quickly turned into concern, and he put his palm out against the mattress.  
He shook his head. “Dan,” he breathed. “This isn’t you, what’s going on?”  
Dan laughed.  
“Oh, and what is, Phil? Because you’d surely know a lot about what is and isn’t me.”  
Dan felt bad for snapping at his friend, but it was too late to take it back now.  
Phil blinked at him, the longer, wetter part of his hair dripping onto the bed.

“What?” Dan tilted his head. “Not sure what real Phil would say?”  
Phil looked down at his lap.  
Dan studied every detail of his face.  
“Look at me,” he ordered.  
Phil obeyed, his face a mix of sadness and concern.  
Dan leaned in. “You’re a joke,” he spat.  
“What?” Phil scoffed at him. He stood up, not wanting to sit so close to Dan anymore.  
“I mean, really!” Dan sat up, his blanket folding down, exposing his bare chest. “What even are you? You’re not human, and you’re not a robot. You’re nothing!” Dan felt his eyes begin to sting.  
“You know nothing about me, do you? I hardly even know anything about you. I can’t take you anywhere. You might as well be a fucking blow up sex doll shaped like Phil,” Dan laughed to himself. “What am I to you, even? I mean, really?”  
Phil’s eyes scanned Dan up and down.  
“You’re my lover,” he said sadly. “You’re my boyfriend, Dan. You’re my everything.”  
But that only made Dan laugh harder.  
“Please,” he scoffed, standing up from the bed, pushing Phil to the side. “Phil was my best friend first, and my boyfriend second.”  
Dan reached into his closet, grabbing a patterned black jumper and pulling it over his head. He swiped his skinny jeans up off the floor from the night before, and stepped into them.

“Where are you going?” Phil’s voice cracked.  
“I’m going to Toms’.” Dan zipped his jeans, ignoring the tears threatening to spill from his eyes. “I can’t stand to look at you today.”  
A few moments ago, Dan was surprised by his anger. But now it was all too real, and he could no longer blame himself. His eyes threatened to spill from rage, but he ignored the warning. The last thing that he wanted was to show Phil his vulnerabilities when he was supposed to be angry. But seeing Phil cry, made him want to do so himself.  
Phil stuttered as Dan ripped a suitcase from the floor of his closet, and threw it onto the bed. He scooped piles of tops, pajamas, and a few spare jeans into his arms and threw them into his suitcase. He ripped chargers from the wall, and tossed them in with the rest of his loose pile.  
“Dan,” Phil begged. “Please don’t go. I’m sorry, what can I do? What can I do to be better?”  
Dan ignored him and ran out into the lounge to grab his laptop from the couch, and walked back into the room to toss it in and angrily zip his suitcase. He threw it to the floor next to his feet, and looked up at Phil, who stood straight next to the bed.  
“What can I do? What did I do?”  
Dan’s eyes practically burrowed holes into Phil’s skin.  
“Maybe it’s time I leave you for once, huh? See how it feels?” Rage rang in Dan’s voice.  
He knew deep down that Phil hadn’t left him on purpose. He knew that if Phil had a choice, he’d very, very much rather be alive with Dan. He knew that his own mortality had always been the last thing on his mind, but still, Dan held a grudge. He was angry that Phil left. He was angry that he had the nerve to leave. He was furious that he had just threw away his own life like did. Phil mindlessly walked out into the street without even considering how fragile his own life was. He didn’t think for a second about Dan, or about his family. Not about his friends, not his future, not even himself.  
But, Dan realized, he probably had when he was lying there on the pavement, with broken bones and blood in his belly. He probably did think about Dan, and how he stood only a few hundred feet away while he was dying. He probably did think about his tour, and his mum and dad.  
Or maybe he just thought about how much pain he was in.

“Dan,” Phil sobbed, tears spilling down his face. “Come on, please talk to me.”  
Dan shook his head and chuckled.  
“See, there. Right there,” he pointed. “Phil wouldn’t have begged and cried there like a child. He would’ve gotten angry and grabbed me by the shoulders to tell me No, Daniel Howell, this is not happening.” Dan mocked. “We are going to sit here until we’ve fixed this. We are not going to fight like teenagers.”  
Phil exhaled heavily, tears running down his cheeks.  
“I’m leaving you, Phil. This time for real,” Dan spat, his fist gripping around the handle of his suitcase.  
Phil took a step forward, putting his hands out in front of him. “Can we please at least talk? I can change, I was made to change! I was made just for you, and nothing but you.”  
Dan swore that he could’ve shattered his molars by how fight he held his jaw together.  
“Let’s not forget that you’re the one who brought me back to begin with, yeah? I want to change, if it makes you happy. If it helps,” Phil sniffled, tears still pouring over his cheeks. “Dan, I love you. I want to be together for as long as we were supposed to be, not being cut short by death this time.”  
Dan only huffed in response.  
“I might be back, I might not. We’ll see,” Dan growled, ignoring what Phil had said. He turned his back, not stopping to say goodbye.  
“Dan!” Phil’s voice cracked through the house behind him, words getting caught in his throat. “What am I supposed to do?!”

But it was too late, Dan had already slammed the front door behind him.  
He stood outside the door, staring at the space in front of him.  
Dan felt his anger fizzle and diffuse into defeat. He hated arguing with Phil, the two always ended up just locking themselves in their rooms and cried until one of them apologized. The second Phil would raise his voice, Dan would start to cry, and deny it. He would say ‘No, no, I’m not crying.’ and Phil’s anger would diffuse, and he’d start to cry too as they both apologized for being so shitty. It had never escalated to one of them leaving in years.  
But Dan wondered, had he gotten into an argument with Phil, or something different entirely?

He whipped out his phone, dialing Tom. He held it to his ear, listening for his voice to break the ringing.  
“Come on, come on,” he whispered under his breath, beginning to walk away from his door in case Phil came out to look for him.  
“Hello,” Tom answered.  
“Tom,” Dan straightened. “Hey. I’m sorry to call you so soon.”  
“Hey, don’t worry,” Tom replied, noticing the frenzy in Dan’s voice. “What’s wrong?”  
“Um, this is so awkward. But, uh, can I stay at yours for a night or two?” Dan felt bad asking. He always found it weird to ask for help, but he was never sure why. But now more than ever he needed the help.  
“Uh, yeah, yeah, sure, Tom said, taken aback. “May I ask why?”  
“Er-” Dan frantically searched for an excuse, but none came. “It’s a long story. I’ll be out of your hair as soon as I can. I just need a place to crash for a bit and-”  
“Dan, stop,” Tom interrupted. “It’s fine. Don’t worry about it. My place is a mess, but you’re welcome to sleep in the guest’s room. We’d be happy to have you.”  
Dan smiled. “Thank you, Tom. Really. I can’t thank you enough. Is it alright if I come now?”  
“Yes, yes, that’s fine. Charlie is home, she’ll let you in. I’ll let her know you’re coming. I’ll see you tonight, alright?” Tom said. Charlie was Tom’s girlfriend who worked from home, who Dan had only met a few times. But she was a pleasant woman, and always seemed to be smiling.  
“See you tonight,” Dan sighed, hanging up the phone. He dragged his suitcase behind him, heading towards the lift in his apartment complex.  
He never really knew Tom before, but he had a feeling that he was about to get to know him in ways he didn’t ever expect to. 

…

Dan ended up staying for a week at Tom’s place.  
He planned on only spending the night, or maybe a couple, but then a week later he was still waking up in the guest room upstairs.  
It wasn’t that Dan was being annoying, or pushy even. It was rather that Charlie, Dan and Tom had all been having such a good time in each other’s companies that none of them wanted Dan to leave. He could never bring himself to say “It’s been fun, but I have to go”, and Tom never wanted, or had the courage, to ask Dan to leave.  
And not to mention that Dan had nowhere that he wanted to be anyway.  
Sure, he could’ve gone home, but he didn’t want to confront Phil. He cringed at the memory of the fight the two had had a few nights ago, and really did not want to return to it. He was awkward normally, much more so when he had to apologize. And besides, he didn’t want to. He was right, Phil was wrong. That was it. He’d made a mistake, and that was the end of the story. There was no what if’s or but’s about it.  
Of course, he didn’t tell Tom.  
He didn’t tell Tom why he was there, or why he couldn’t go home. He didn’t tell him what was going on, and he didn’t plan on doing so. Tom never asked apart from when he was on the phone, and Dan was thankful for that. He didn’t know what he would say if he asked, and he wasn’t sure where he would even start if he were to tell the real story. He knew that he wouldn’t be able to lie. His eyes would dart to the side, and he would awkwardly chuckle to cover it up. He’d move his hands when he talked, and it would be painfully obvious that he wasn’t telling the truth.  
So he just kept his mouth shut. Instead he made Charlie and Tom laugh, and made fun of their dog when he did something stupid. 

Most days while Dan was there, Tom would go off to work, Charlie would work from upstairs, and Dan stayed in the living room, out of anyone’s way. He’d watch TV, or play on his laptop, and just be useless. He couldn’t work, as recording a video in a house that wasn’t his would raise a few questions. He was too sad to work anyway. When nobody was looking, he’d mope around and dwell on his mistake of bringing Phil back.  
He liked to tell himself that he wasn’t upset after his fight with Phil, but he was. It was the first thing Dan woke up to, anger. He was angry with Phil a few mornings ago, but now he was just angry with himself.  
He wanted to point a finger at his mum for giving him the idea, but he knew that wasn’t fair to her. She warned him that he shouldn’t sign up if it was going to ruin his life, and he went on with it anyway. He thought that maybe he’d call her and ask what to do, but he couldn’t bring himself to admit to his mother that he’d been wrong. He knew that she’d tilt her head and sigh, in that way that mums do when they’re disappointed.  
Hell, Dan could barely admit to himself that he was wrong, much less anyone else. He wasn’t about to call up his mum to chat about what a mistake he’d made. 

When Tom got home, though, Dan felt better. Everyone would go into the living room most nights and watch TV together, or play video games, or whatever it was. It wasn’t weird - or at least, Dan didn’t think it was. He had a good time with his friends, and it was good to get away for awhile.

Some nights he stayed awake thinking about what Phil was doing. He was probably bored out of his mind, considering how much he relied on Dan for entertainment.  
But really, Dan didn’t care. He didn’t have emotions, not real ones, anyway. He didn’t need anything, not to sleep, not to eat, not even to be happy. He wasn’t human, and the world could collapse tomorrow and he wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.  
It was strange to think about Phil in such a cruel way. Once Dan had held Phil up on a pedestal, loving him with all his heart. In his mind, Phil was perfect, even though he was clearly rough around the edges. But he was human, like anyone else. He made mistakes, and he was annoying sometimes. Fake Phil wasn’t. He never made mistakes, he never tripped over his own feet or spilled coffee all over the floor when he wasn’t paying attention. He wasn’t his normal, shy, bubbly self. Rather, he was a shell of the Phil that Dan used to know.  
He didn’t know what to do about it. Could the thing even be “deactivated”, so to speak? Dan wanted his apartment back, he wanted his life back. Even if it meant that he’d have to go through grief all over again.  
He decided that he needed to find out. So at about 2 in the morning, while Tom and Charlie were asleep in their room, Dan sat up from his bed. He took out his laptop and squinted as his eyes adjusted to the harsh light of his screen. He used his trackpad to open a new tab, and put his fingers over the keyboard.  
Dan typed in the word ‘Serenity’, and the website he had visited a couple of months prior automatically came up.  
He pressed enter, and waited for the screen to load under Tom’s shitty internet.  
He searched for an “FAQ” section, and once he found it his eyes scanned the words to find a question along the lines of what he wanted to know.  
Eventually, he found it.  
The screen read,  
“Can I deactivate this service?  
“The answer is yes. If you’ve decided that bringing your loved one home isn’t right for you, or perhaps you just don’t want to be called anymore, deactivation is always an option. If you’ve signed up for the phone service, send us an email (which can be found on the ‘about us’ page) and we’ll unsubscribe you. If you’ve purchased our ‘Bring Them Home’ program, deactivation is a bit more tricky. You need to call or email us, and let us know. An employee will come within 24 hours to do the job for you. However, deactivating yourself is also an option. This option is uncommon, however. If this seems right for you, contact us and we will walk you through it.”  
Instantly, Dan opened his email box.  
There was no fucking way that he was going to it himself. That was the end of it.  
He imagined that deactivating Phil would be like killing him. He’d have to dispose of him somehow, and judging how activating him in the first place felt like dealing with a corpse, he knew that deactivating him would be the same deal.

He typed in the email for Serenity, and typed out a short and sweet message requesting for someone to come the next day to take care of Phil.  
Once he pressed send, he threw his laptop at the edge of the bed and tossed the blanket over him. He closed his eyes, letting himself sleep, knowing that he would leave in the morning. And while he knew having to tell Phil what he planned to do would be unbearable, he was calm anyway. He told himself that that was tomorrow Dans’ problem, and that for now he was in bed, where nothing could go wrong.  
At least, not until the morning.

…

Surprisingly enough, he actually woke up early.  
Dan woke up at 8:30am, but didn’t get up until 9. He played on his phone for half an hour until he heard Tom rustling downstairs and remembered that he needed to go.  
He got dressed and brushed his teeth in the bathroom in the hallway, with a spare toothbrush and travel sized toothpaste that he borrowed off Tom. He’d forgotten to pack a toothbrush in his frenzy of rage when he was leaving, so he had to ask to borrow one.  
Once he made the guest bed and picked his things up off the floor and put them in his suitcase, he picked it up by the handle and made his way down Tom’s old wooden stairs. 

“Hey,” Tom commented, noticing Dan in the kitchen with him. “You’re up early.”  
“Yeah,” Dan placed his bag on the floor, his voice still croaking from hardly being awake.  
“You want breakfast?” Tom shut the pantry and placed a box of what looked like pancake mix on the counter. “I was going to make pancakes. Charlie’s awake upstairs, she’s just getting ready, by the way.”  
“No thanks, I’ve got somewhere to be.”  
Tom shot a look at him. “Where?”  
“Someone’s coming to the flat later today and I need to be there,” Dan explained.  
Tom raised an eyebrow, placing a hand on the counter behind him.  
“What?” Dan shook his head.  
Tom ran his fingers through his hair. “Nothing, I just,” He paused for a moment to look at Dan who stood a few feet away from him, waiting for him to say something.  
“I know it’s none of my business. But what the hell is going on?” Tom gestured with his hands. “I mean, you stay for a week, don’t explain why you’re even here, and suddenly you need to be back home because a mysterious person is coming to your house? Not to mention that you live alone, by the way. What could there possibly be waiting for you at home that you can’t stand to be around?” Tom shook his head.  
“The thought has crossed my mind that you just can’t stand to be around Phil’s possessions. Which I get, absolutely. But I feel like this would’ve dawned on you sooner.” He explained. “What is it, Dan? Did you order a giant fucking dildo that you need to sign for or what?” He laughed humorlessly.  
Dan smiled, because he didn’t know what else to do with his face.  
“You’re right,” Dan signed, running his fingers through his greasy hair. “I know I’ve been unfair, but it’s not something that you can just say. It’s weird.”  
Tom nodded understandingly.  
“The truth is, I needed time away from myself,” Dan lied. “You’re right when you say that the feeling of dread around where Phil used to be should’ve come sooner, and it has. But being alone for the first time is so awful, I needed a shoulder to lean on, I guess. A bed to sleep in that wasn’t mine.”  
His eyes met Tom’s, consciously making an effort to not look suspicious.  
“But now I think I’m better. Okay, even,” Dan stuttered, trying to be quick to end the conversation as soon as possible. “But I really do need to get home. You’ve been wonderful, Tom. Thank you.”  
Tom smiled in response, and Dan prayed that he took the bait.  
“That was a great speech,” Tom laughed. “You’re sure you don't want breakfast, though?” He said, changing the subject as if nothing had ever happened.  
“No, that’s okay,” Dan said. He did, in fact want pancakes, but he had to get back to his flat. He knew that the guy for Phil wouldn’t be there for hours, but still he wanted to be absolutely sure that he wouldn’t miss him. It was out of character for him, sure, but he wanted to make sure not to add another drink to this cocktail of mistakes that he’d made for himself. “I better get going, tell Charlie I said goodbye, okay?”  
Tom walked over to where Dan stood, and gave him a hug.  
“Alright, I will,” Tom said before pulling away from the hug to look at Dan. “I’ll see you around, yeah?”  
“Yeah,” Dan nodded. “Bye, Tom,” Dan headed for the front door, unlocking it and stepping outside. “I’ll see you later.”  
“Bye,” Tom said again, clearly a little bit disappointed that Dan didn’t stay for breakfast. He closed the door behind him, and Dan heard the lock click once it was shut.

He noticed his stomach rumbling, and almost wished that he had stayed for pancakes.  
But Dan reminded himself that he needed to be home. He could eat later, he decided. He had food at his house, and he could survive with eating cereal that had been in the pantry since the last time he went to the shops, instead of freshly made pancakes.  
It was fine. He was going to go home, see Phil one last time, and then this whole ordeal would be over.  
And as Dan walked down the London street, it dawned on him once again. Phil was going to be gone, again.  
Did he really want to get rid of him, forever? He had the option between life and death. He could decide whether or not Phil was to leave or stay, unlike the last time he left.  
But Dan knew that it wasn’t really Phil he would be leaving. It’d be a shell, a Phil shaped doll with a functioning dick attached.  
“I’ll buy a fucking dildo,” Dan muttered under his breath, out loud by mistake. He’d made up his mind, and he didn’t realize that he had weeks before. But today, this morning, he was going to finally do something about it. Being passive wasn’t going to get him anywhere.  
He’d already started to grieve his boyfriend once before. It was time that he finally finished the cycle. 

...

It was an hour before Dan got home. The Tube was delayed, the reason being a mystery, and he decided that he didn’t really want to know to begin with.  
But once he did get home, the clouds blocked out the sun, not a single patch of sunlight being able to shine through. They were massive and a depressing shade of grey, hanging above London buildings. People rushed to get inside, knowing that if they stayed out they would be soaking within minutes.  
Without even checking the weather, Dan knew that it was due to storm. It wasn’t raining just yet, but the distant low rumble in the sky told everyone in London to get inside, or at least grab an umbrella if they must be out.

When he was little, his family used to say that when it stormed, it meant that God was crying.  
And while he didn’t stick to his Christian beliefs, sometimes when it rained he still pictured a God in the clouds, crying with his head in his hands sitting on a throne in the grey clouds.  
Except, he didn’t think that if there was a God that he would sit on a throne. That was a human thing, royalty. God would likely not be a narcissist. 

Dan clicked his keys into the front door, and quietly as he could manage he slipped inside his house. His heart was pounding in his ears and his hands shook at his sides. He hoped that he wouldn’t have to confront Phil, even though he knew that he would. But still, the hope was there.

All the lights seemed to be shut off, and the curtains hung from the windows, blocking out any sunlight that would’ve gotten through the clouds and made its way through the glass.  
The place felt untouched. It was like nobody had been home for weeks, even though Dan knew that someone had been loitering inside. He wished that the former had been the case.

He placed his bag on the floor at his feet. He kicked off his shoes and quietly walked to his bedroom, careful not to make the wooden floor creak under his weight.  
Dan quietly prayed that Phil wouldn’t come out, expecting an explanation.  
But he did.  
“Dan?” Phil’s voice rang behind Dan, making him jump and turn around to look at him. His eyes rounded at the sight of his friend, standing perfectly still at the other side of the hallway. He started at him, words getting caught in his throat.  
Phil crossed his arms to return Dan’s glance.  
Neither of them said anything, just studied each other up and down.  
“Phil- I-” Dan managed to choke out. “You’re-”  
“What? Still here? You’re surprised?” Phil interrupted, a coldness in his tone. “Thought you could just leave me here and forget about it, like a dog at the pound?”  
Dan almost choked on his tongue.  
“What were you going to do, anyway? Just run away, and then what? Stop paying rent and pretend none of this ever happened?”  
Dan straightened his back and took a step towards Phil. He said nothing.  
Phil looked him up and down, his cold eyes mocking him.  
“What?” Phil shrugged. “What is it?”  
“I’ve ordered for you to be deactivated,” Dan admitted, his eyes meeting Phils’, 5 feet away.  
Phil uncrossed his arms, and his eyebrows raised in surprise.  
“You- you what?” He practically yelled.  
Dan took two steps toward.  
Phil stuttered, looking for something to say, but shock grabbed him and held him back.  
“Oh sorry,” Dan mocked, strolling closer and closer towards Phil until they were a foot away. “I thought I was the one who brought you back to begin with, hm?”  
“Dan,” Phil shook his head, breaking the eye contact between him and Dan. He looked at the floor and held his hands curled into fists at his waist. “I- I can’t believe you would-”  
Dan broke Phil’s sentence with his gaze. His retinas burned into Phil’s skin, and his jaw snapped shut.  
“Phil, listen,” Dan began, not letting himself become angry. “I didn’t want it to come to this. I didn’t, really. But you’re not Phil, and you never will be.”  
Phil shook his head.  
“It’s my fault, not yours,” Dan sighed. “This- you, were a bad idea on my part. You’re not the same bubbly, nerdy Phil that I’ve known for so long. You’re not human. You’re nothing.”  
Dan’s eyes began to sting.

“I’m going to make food,” Dan pushed past Phil towards the kitchen.  
Phil followed, looking for something to say.  
Dan turned on the kitchen lights and made himself a bowl of cereal before looking up at Phil who stood behind the island.  
“There’s nothing I can do to change your mind?” Phil shook his head.  
Dan sighed. “No, Phil. There’s nothing to be said.”  
“Well,” Phil looked at the ground. “I guess that’s it, then.”  
“I guess so.”

Neither Dan nor Phil said a word. A sadness hung in the air, and the rain from outside had just begun to patter against the windows.

“If you don’t mind,” Dan put away the milk and cereal and took his bowl in his hands. “I’m going to go eat my breakfast in my room and stay there until the guy comes for you.”  
He ignored Phil, and walked towards his bedroom and closed the door behind him. He sat down at his desk, and ate his cereal with complete silence except for the sound of the rain against his windows.  
Dan didn’t know what Phil was doing, and frankly, he didn’t care. As long as he would be gone in a few hours.  
He’d gotten an email when he was on the way home that someone would be home at around 2pm for Phil. It was almost noon, but time was moving so slowly that day that it didn’t matter what time it was. 2pm couldn’t have arrived sooner.

Once he was done eating, he walked out of his bedroom to put his bowl into the sink, and noticed Phil sitting on the couch.  
“What are you doing?” He questioned.  
“Nothing,” Phil replied with a monotone voice.  
Dan looked around the room like he was expecting something.  
“Don’t you want to watch TV or something?” Dan asked.  
He knew that Phil got bored when he was gone, and he figured he’d be ecstatic for Dan to come home. But he supposed that since he’d told him the news that he didn’t care. He wanted nothing to do with him, and he couldn’t blame him. He’d essentially told him that he would be dead within a few hours, anybody would be upset by that.  
“The guy’s coming at 2,” Dan said.  
“Okay,” Phil replied, clearly not wanting to engage.  
Dan twiddled his thumbs. He’d be lying if he said he didn’t feel bad.  
Damn it, Dan wished that he could just be cold and mean to this ‘Fake Phil’ before sending him off, never to see him again. He wished he could just forget that any of this would ever happen.  
He knew that he was going to miss Phil once he was gone. He was bracing himself for the grief that would inevitably wash over him the second he was out the door.  
But really, he knew that Phil was already gone. He had been for months. He never came back to begin with. The only thing that would be different was that he would be that he’d be alone again. He would never see or touch anything or anyone that looked like Phil ever again after 2pm on that day. 

“Do you want to have sex?” he blurted out without thinking.  
Phil turned around, putting his arm on the couch to look at Dan.  
“Excuse me?” He sighed, shaking his head. “I’m about to leave forever and that’s what’s on your mind?”  
“Yes?” Dan said as it was obvious. “I can’t talk to you for these next few hours, because that would just make me miss you more. You’re a useless friend -and boyfriend, for that matter- but you’re not useless everywhere.”  
Phil blinked in surprise.  
“Is that a no?”  
Phil turned around and said nothing. Dan stood in the hallway behind the living room, waiting for Phil to say something, but he didn’t. Just as Dan turned to leave, not necessarily disappointed, Phil stood up from the couch and walked over to Dan. He brushed up against him gently.  
“Not if you don’t want it to be,” Phil breathed into Dan’s ear, holding his hand lightly in his own.  
“Ooh,” Dan marveled. He followed Phil as he led his hand towards Dan’s bedroom.  
The last thing he was expecting to do that day was come home and have sex with Phil, but here he was, his jeans already halfway to the floor by the time the bedroom door was closed.

…

The sound of the doorbell ringing through the house made Dan and Phil jump.  
The two were holding each other in bed -fully clothed- waiting for the guy from Serenity to come. Despite expecting him, the doorbell still startled them both.  
After the two were finished, they stayed cuddling in bed, and once Dan realized what time it was he ordered Phil to get up and get dressed so that they wouldn’t have to scramble to do so later on.  
Once they had both been dressed, they lied back down in bed to hold each other for one final time.

“It’s weird, you know,” Dan had said, minutes before the doorbell rang.  
“What is?” Phil asked, running his fingers through Dan’s curly hair.  
“I don’t remember the last time I held you, or told you I loved you.”  
“I do,” Phil replied.  
“No, I mean,” Dan shifted. “I don’t remember the last time I told you I loved you. The real you- when you were alive.”  
“Oh.”  
“The thing is, I don’t remember because I didn’t take note of it. I don’t remember the last time I said ‘I love you’ because I didn’t know that it would be the last time. So now when I try to remember it, nothing comes up. Because I didn’t think that I would have to look back on it.”  
Phil said nothing, and neither did Dan.  
Dan moved his head so that he could look at Phil.  
“I remember the last time we kissed, though,” He frowned. “It was the day you died, minutes before, actually. At least, minutes before you were hit.”  
Phil blinked sadly at Dan, and Dan inhaled through his nose.  
“It was a Thursday. It was sunny outside, at least, as sunny as it could be in the middle of Winter. You were going to go out and grab something from the store, I don’t remember what. It was only a few blocks down, so you said that you could just walk,” Dan’s voice rang with sadness, and Phil ran his hand up and down Dan’s back.  
“I was in the lounge on my laptop, and you came out of our room and told me you were going out. You were wearing your winter coat, the one with the fluffy hood. You ran over to the couch to say goodbye. You closed your eyes and put your hand on my shoulder, and kissed me, softly, and quickly. Like it was a habit. As if we’d do it every single day for the rest of our lives.”  
Dan sighed. “And that was it. That was the last time I ever saw you.”

Phil had a sad look on his face.  
It bothered Dan. It bothered him that he was telling the story of a dead man to that said dead man. It bothered him that every ounce of life had been taken from his eyes. It bothered him that he was about to leave. But it also bothered him that he was still here.  
That’s when the doorbell rang.

Dan sprung up, and speed-walked to the front door, not leaving time for Phil to react. He gathered himself and unlocked the door to greet a skinny man with a small bag that was presumably filled with tools- whatever that meant, exactly. He was wearing a white button-up shirt with black dress pants, his hair neatly pulled back.  
“Good afternoon,” The man greeted, putting out his hand for Dan to shake it. “I’m Will, and you must be Dan.”  
Dan shook Will’s hand, smiling a weak smile at him. “Yes, that’s me. Come in.”  
Will stepped inside Dan’s flat and closed the door behind him.  
“Nice place,” he complimented, trying to make casual small talk.  
“Thanks,” Dan rubbed his palms on his shirt.  
“I’m sure you know what I’m here for,” Will said, a gentleness in his voice.  
“Yes,” Dan nodded. “Follow me.”  
Dan led Will to his bedroom where Phil was, and pushed open his door to see him sitting on the bed.  
Phil looked up at Dan, and then to Will. Dan gestured Will inside his room, ignoring Phil’s concern.

“That’s him?” Will presumed.  
“Mhm,” Dan nodded, crossing his arms so that he wouldn’t bite his nails.  
Will looked over to Dan, loosening his grip on his bag. “Do you want to be here for this?”  
Dan studied Will’s face for a moment. The skinny man seemed to genuinely want to help, even if he was just doing his job. A simple job, most likely. Weird, definitely, but simple.  
“No, I don’t, actually. If you two could go into the lounge that would be great,” Dan admitted.  
Will nodded, gesturing to Phil to stand up and follow him. 

The two began to walk out of Dan’s bedroom, but Phil stopped to face Dan.  
Phil looked at him with a sad look on his face, but his eyes didn’t accompany that look.  
“Can I at least kiss you?” Phil asked.  
Dan stared at him for a moment, dumbfounded. He looked him up and down and considered it.  
He leaned in and placed his hand lightly on Phil’s jawbone, and looked at his lips. Normally he would stare into his eyes before kissing him, but his eyes weren’t like oceans anymore. Not even swimming pools. They were flat, and dead. Nothing, really.  
Dan closed his eyes, and pressed his lips against Phil’s. He lingered there for a second, letting Phil lean into him. Just as Phil put his hand on Dan’s side, he pulled away. Phil looked disappointed, almost. Like he was expecting something else to happen.

Will was waiting in the hallway for Phil, and watched Dan and Phil silently and patiently.  
“Go,” Dan whispered under his breath. Phil walked past him, following Will into the lounge.  
Dan held the door open and watched the back of Phil’s head as he walked down the dark hallway. He sadly shut the door, and sat down on the bed. He sat silently with his legs crossed, staring at the blank wall of his bedroom.  
On any other day, his hands would’ve shook and his eyes would’ve well up with tears. But today, Dan just sat, listening to the thunder rumble outside his house. He didn’t know how Phil was being ‘deactivated’, but all Dan knew was that in minutes, he would be gone. It was exactly what he wanted, exactly what he signed up for.  
He didn’t feel sad, or scared like the thought he would, just unnerved. He knew exactly what was to come, a lifetime of grief and slowly trying to get over his fear of people close to him dying. He’d eventually get over Phil’s death and go out to date someone, but for now he would be alone. He’d miss Phil, and the feeling of dread for what was to come overcame him.  
Dan supposed that he could understand what he was thinking when he brought Phil back. He was grieving, and irrational. He still was. But now he could make decisions for himself, and he knew what would be best.  
Really, the best thing would be that Phil never died in the first place. That they’d grow old and die together like they were supposed to, not being cut short by death.  
But that was never going to happen. Phil was dead, and that was it. He would just have to learn to live with the constant empty space beside him.

Will knocked on Dan’s bedroom door after what felt like seconds, but the time on the clock said that it had been at least a few minutes.  
Dan stood up from his bed and gently opened the door.  
“I’ve finished my job, thank you. I just thought I’d say goodbye, have a wonderful evening,” Will smiled politely after Dan had opened the door.  
“Oh, okay, thank you,” Dan replied, his hand on the doorknob.  
“If I may,” Dan added as Will turned to leave. “What did you do with er- it?”  
“No worries,” Will smiled, turning back to face Dan. “There’s really no way to say this without sounding like a serial killer, so forgive me,” Will chuckled, his London accent ringing in his voice.  
“I’ve wrapped the body up in disposable plastic, and when I get back to headquarters it will be disposed of properly, in a way that does not hurt the environment in any way,” Will continued.  
“Oh, well,” Dan nodded, making a desperate attempt to smile politely, but it just came off as seeming awkward. “Thank you again.”  
“Of course, have a great day.”  
“You too,” Dan closed his bedroom door behind Will, making a note to lock the front door after he left.  
He sat back down at the foot of his unmade bed, and listened as Will collected his things and shut the door.

That was it.  
The realization that he was alone hit Dan like a train.  
He had his friends and family, he had people who loved him.  
So why did he feel so lonely?  
It was like the sun had been eclipsed. And in a way, it had. The clouds blocked out any sunlight that would’ve gotten through on any other day. The harsh storm that filled the London afternoon sky was appropriate. It was like it was meant to be there, like it was planned.  
Whether the dim lights above Dan’s head were on or not made no difference; the world would’ve seemed just as grey. His already dark bedroom had been desaturated of color.  
The normally bright color in his eyes had gone dead, just as Phils’ had.

Dan crawled under his sheets, not bothering to get up and lock the door like he told himself he would. He wrapped the blanket around his shoulders and closed his eyes as his head hit the pillow.  
Even though he knew that he shouldn’t, he let himself be sad.  
But after the past few months, he felt as if he deserved it.  
He had a boyfriend who had died twice now. He was short on money from recently paying rent that was supposed to be split between two people, and he desperately needed a haircut as the shaved bits of his hair poured over his ears.  
He was sad, but he didn't want to cry. His heart ached in his chest and his eyelids carried heavy over his eyes.

Really, he was depressed. He had been for years, it was nothing new.  
And so today he wasn’t surprised when his body weighed down onto his bed, as his mind begged him to get up and live his life. At least, normally it would. Today he let the emptiness wash over him like waves, as if he was drowning. 

In that moment, his mind told him he was going to be lonely forever, and Dan believed it. He loved and was loved for 9 years straight, but now it was over. Nobody would ever love him the way Phil did, and that was it.  
Deep down he knew that wasn't true. But for now, today, it was.

Phil was gone, and Dan might as well have been too.  
No matter how much he imagined it, or for how long he daydreamed, it was never going to bring Phil back. He was dead. He was 6 feet underground, had been for months, and always will be. Dan dreaded the idea that he would have to live the rest of his life without him.  
It felt like he’d known Phil forever, and not just in the way that you do when you fall in love. In the way that Dan knew him since he was 18, and nearly a decade later he still did. 9 years later Dan and Phil were still together, and were still in just as much love as they were when they were kids. He could hardly remember a time when they didn’t know each other.  
Now, Phil was just a memory, nothing more, nothing less.

In the end, the story of Dan and Phil didn’t have a happy ending, no matter how much everyone wished it did.


End file.
